I wrote this story almost five years ago on this same computer when it was brand new. I thought, "I'll just copy and paste that sucker right in here! For some reason, that wouldn't work. That's okay, though. I can make it more of a Rand McNally and less of a history. The history began on April 30th, 2005, the date agreed upon when I would leave my job at F/X Scenery and Display to begin packing our five hundred tons of stuff. Carmen had applied to, and was accepted by three schools: Vanderbilt Divinity, Harvard Divinity and Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS,) in Newton, Massachusetts, where she decided to go. She had a friend from Lesley U that lived in Cambridge, MA and working together, by phone and internet, they found an acceptable apartment in Belmont. "Acceptable" meant that there would be room for about two hundred fifty tons of our stuff, and the rent was under fifteen hundred.
As it turned out, April 30th was a bit premature. Carmen was not willing to turn me loose on packing, and her attention was focused elsewhere. She sent me and my pickup truck over to the storage unit where we had put some of our stuff for decluttering purposes while showing the house to prospective buyers. I was to take an inventory. I rented a second unit and was able to declutter the house some more while moving inventoried items around. One unit was used strictly for stuff that would be stored in my parents' attic in the mountains of north Georgia. My parents had also offered to adopt our ten-year-old orange tabby, Mr. Peanut Butter, to save us from moving with four cats, and to save him from living in an urban apartment. I was scheduled to haul all of this to Georgia on the weekend of the 21st.
My next gig was to attack the massive stash of boxes we had been collecting for a year. To save room, I had nested boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes and stacked them tightly into the workshop corner of the garage. Suddenly, Carmen was willing to park her car in the driveway to give me room to spread the boxes out so we would know what we had. I organized them by sizes and pretty much filled the whole garage with them. I was sure we'd never use all of them. I was wrong.
Hmmmm, what now? Well, our friend Cathey was about to move to Charlottesville, Virginia. Maybe I could help her for a few days. I called her on May 11th, and she seemed delighted to have professional help. "Do you need any boxes?" I asked. "Gee, I guess I do!" she replied. I spent three days helping her pack, load and haul donations to the church for the upcoming rummage sale. She ordered a semi trailer to be dropped off so she could put her stuff into a sixteen foot section of it. While we were returning from one church trip we passed Lowe's, which suddenly reminded her: "The contract says something about plywood," she said. Something about two sheets of plywood to divide my section from the next section."
"Should I stop and pick them up now?" I asked. She wasn't sure exactly what was needed. "I'll have to look at the contract," she said. "It has to be some certain dimensions." We got back to her condo, and she fired up her computer. She searched around, found the contract and scanned it for the plywood clause. "Ah, here it is," she said after what seemed like a long time. "It has to be two sheets, four feet by eight feet." I reckoned I could conjure that up.
At the end of the third day, the trailer was loaded, plywooded and locked with a padlock, and all of the donations were at the church. Cathey bought me dinner at the Steak And Shake, and we were done. I had to find something else to occupy my time.
Sunday the 15th was one big thing off Carmen's list of things to worry about. She delivered a sermon about her call to ministry, what it means, what it's like and where do we go from here. I was very proud. After the service there was a cake, a lot of cards, a book for friends to write their thoughts in, lots of pictures taken and lots of tears and hugs.
On the 16th, Carmen thought I might could get started with the books. I was to sort them into subjects - religion, human interaction, death and dying, women's issues, nature, children's books, even a smattering of fiction - stacked on the benches in the family room to be boxed up later. I actually packed my own books: the encyclopedias, the Civil War history, the Carl Sagan, the Tom Robbins. My books: three boxes; her books would end up being thirty five boxes.
On May 21st, I was at the U-Haul place at 7:00am. After some looking, we found one eight foot trailer with all lights working. I hitched it up and hauled it over to the storage units where, armed with my four-page inventory, I loaded the trailer and truck bed with stuff bound for north Georgia. I drove to the house, unloaded the trailer, loaded in the furniture that was going, plus the Dell computer we were giving my dad to help him write a novel, and reloaded everything nice and tight. I tarped over the truck bed stuff, locked the trailer and called it a day.
The next day, Sunday, I loaded my Thermos with strong coffee, drank the rest of the pot, stuffed an unhappy Peanut Butter into a carrier, and was on the road at daybreak. The passenger side floor was equipped with a litter box, so when I had to stop near Ocala and drain off some coffee, I opened the carrier and placed Mr. Butter in the litter. When I returned, Peanut was lounging on top of his carrier, and there was a strong fecal odor in the cab. I scooped the litter, but there was nothing there. I looked in the carrier. Nothing. I searched the rest of the cab and found it. If you read my posting entitled "Adventures In Hauling Luggage," you'll remember the cap I bought in Anchorage. It now resides in a landfill in Marion County, Florida, with a big load of cat shit inside it. That boy done shit in my hat! I put him back in his carrier.
The only other item of note on this trip was a gas and gifts store in Arabi, Georgia. It had two cash registers. No waiting? HA! One register was for gas only. If you wanted a bottle of water or a cup of coffee with your gas, you had to stand in line twice, and the non-gas register didn't accept credit cards! Somebody lay awake nights dreaming up a way to make things difficult for the customers and the employees.
Beyond Atlanta, as the terrain got hillier, my good old Toyota T-100 pulled that heavy trailer with no problem. The hills became mountains. No problem. Up Smokey Estates Road, down White Oak Drive and up the steep driveway to the front porch we went. I opened the door and hauled Mr. Butter inside the house. I opened the carrier, and Peanut cowered inside. My parents and I ate supper and visited out on the treetop deck. Peanut slunk out of the carrier and into the bathroom, where he cowered some more. That night he stayed in my room, sealed off from their old cat, Charlie. Peanut was restless, and neither of us got much sleep.
I stayed two more days. We unloaded the trailer and truck bed, distributing everything to the proper places, and took the trailer to the U-Haul place in Blairsville. Of course we stopped for a few groceries on the way back, ate lunch and went upstairs to set up the computer. My dad was overwhelmed by the complexity of it. When I showed him how to use the word processing, he was as mystified as he was amazed. I believe I can truthfully say that after nearly five years and many hundreds of pages typed, he is still mystified.
Peanut and Charlie had some issues in the beginning. Charlie insisted on following peanut around wherever he went, disturbing him when he tried to rest. For his part, Peanut gobbled up whatever cat food he found, which interfered with Charlie's habit of nibbling a little bit here and a little bit there all day long. My parents insisted that they would learn to get along. I figured that since I was coming back through here in a month, I could take Peanut with me if things couldn't work out. As it turned out, Charlie died within a few months, and Mr. Butter is king of their household, as it should be.
Unencumbered, my truck flew back to Orlando, ready for the next task.
The next task was to neatly put the books back on the shelves, keeping them sorted if possible. A couple was coming to look at the house this weekend. I also did a little cosmetic surgery on the gutters and neatened up the boxes in the garage. I went to a movie during the house showing on Sunday afternoon. We didn't need my baloney lips-a-flapping while Carmen was selling the house. The best thing was, it was a great house, built solid and true in the fifties, and in much better shape than most newer houses. Krystal and Brad offered us a contract two days later. We scheduled the closing for June 20th, three days after the movers were scheduled to come. My departure was scheduled for the 16th, in case the movers got to Belmont at the earliest possible moment. We didn't want them to charge us for storage if we weren't there to receive our stuff.
After researching moving companies, we hired Lawson, a third generation moving magnate with a million moving stories to tell. We shuffled him out the door after only a few hundred. Meanwhile we were packing packing packing, and giving away tons of stuff. The church got a couple of truckloads. "A Gift For Teaching" got a couple of truckloads. Our friends who came to visit always left with something. I boxed up the books, we boxed up all of the pottery!, we gave the queen size bed and Carmen's giant desk to a family she worked with.
The plan was for me to drive my pickup with a U-Haul trailer loaded with everything she didn't trust the movers to move - computers, pottery, essential books - and our big boy kitty Remus J. Lupin. Then I could sell my truck for a great price because it had never weathered a New England winter with salt and sand on the roads. On the very day I was to go pick up my trailer, she changed our mind. Instead, we rented and loaded a fourteen foot Budget truck. She would sell the T-100 in Orlando. Then she and her mother, Sandra, would drive the little white kitties and as much stuff as they could stuff into the Rav-4 to Blairsville to see my parents, then on to Massachusetts.
One thing I had done a few days before was to buy a second Rand McNally Road Atlas, mark out the route, state by state, in pink highlighter, tab the pages numbered 1-10, and write up directions, route number by route number, all the way from the Florida Turnpike to 14 Upland Road in Belmont. I had my own copy of the directions, and as I went, I followed the same route to make sure everything worked. It did. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So we cancelled our trailer and rented a truck. With it we hauled home another big bag of packing peanuts and two more wardrobe boxes - bringing the total to five. This was when I loaded the bed and the disassembled giant desk into the truck and hauled it to Melissa's house. Then I drove to the storage unit, emptied it and cancelled our storage rental. I drove home and backed up the driveway as the next horrendous thunderstorm hit.
It was apparent by this time that I wasn't going to get on the road tomorrow as planned. For one thing, the pottery had not yet begun to be packed. This was an ordeal beyond my wildest imaginings. Each piece was bubble wrapped and floating in packing peanuts in a box. Then the box was floated in peanuts nested inside another box. A group of three or four of these units were packed in more peanuts inside a big box. A lot of my job was running to the garage for the perfect sized box for each step of the process. Pottery took both of us an entire day. Pottery is a good thing to collect if you are going to be moving a lot. You know, it may be heavy, but hey, at least it's fragile. We called it a load at about 11:00 and went to bed - hey! There was no bed!
June 17th at 8:00 am, I pulled out of the driveway as Lawson's truck was maneuvering to back in. Remus and I took the easy route, driving a Budget truck to Blairsville and Belmont. Back in Orlando, the movers loaded the truck in yet another horrendous rain storm. Party Marty Haddad came over and helped Carmen with the last minute packing, but even so, the contents of the big storage place in the garage - The Bunker - escaped the move.
As soon as the movers were gone, Carmen went to the airport and picked up her mother. They spent the next couple of days figuring out what to take in the Rav 4, hauling more truckloads of stuff to the church and other places, and then selling the truck.
Our "little dog" Remus J. Lupin cried and cried in his cat carrier during the first several hours of the trip. I let him out to use the litter box when I stopped for gas and an exchange of liquids in Lake City, Florida. I didn't leave my hat in the truck. The fun thing here was a big sign over the rest rooms: NO LOITERING NO ALCOHOL NO PROFANITY. I saw the proprietor standing outside the store as I went in. "No profanity?" I asked. "That's Right," he said. "Damn!" I said.
There were no deposits in the litter, and Professor Lupin was back in the carrier when I returned. We continued on to Blairsville, arriving a little after 6:00. I put Remus and his litter box upstairs in our room while we ate supper and then unloaded a few more Georgia items from the truck. Mr. Butter came to me and said hello one time, then ignored me completely. He seemed quite at home there.
After breakfast (9:00!) we lit out. We were breaking new ground today, taking US 76 all the way to Interstate 85. I opened the cat carrier once we were well under way. Remus came out and curled up in my lap for a couple of hours. I kept seeing signs about shortcuts to I 85, and I even took one. It was a shortcut if one was headed south. It added about twelve miles to my trip. The directions I gave Carmen were better. I stopped for gas at the Interstate. Remus went exploring while I was out. He found the step-down well by the passenger's side door, and stayed there for the rest of the day.
Carmen called in the afternoon. The truck was sold, and she threw in the lawnmower as a bonus.
It's a beautiful drive through the Carolinas and Virginia. We switched to I 77 at Charlotte and I 81 in southern Virginia. The truck handled the mountains very well. We spent the night at the Days Inn in Winchester, VA, where Remus finally used the litter box.
After gassing and coffeeing up in Winchester, we shot through West Virginia and Maryland without blinking so we didn't miss them. Then it was a long hard slog through Pennsylvania. There were hundreds of miles of construction going on. At Scranton we jogged over on I 380 to I 84, which took us through New York and Connecticut, all the way to I 90, the Massachusetts Turnpike. After that I wished I'd had a navigator. Professor Lupin was absolutely no help down in his pit. I saw the sign that said I 495 to I 95, and exited the Pike. I went five miles before I could turn around and get back to the Pike. Then I got off on the real I 95 to US 20 and had to find State Road 60, which I was just lucky enough to see. This got me to Trapelo Road in Belmont, Beech Street, Upland Road and I was there! And - I was only seventy miles over the allotted mileage for a trip from Orlando to Belmont without furniture deliveries, visits to relatives, bogus shortcuts or wrong exits. Only fifty bucks (so far) added to the rental.
I loaded the Perfesser into his carrier and went to the door. I called Carmen as I went to the door, and gave her the blow-by-blow. I entered the little screened porch that serves the upstairs apartment as well, unlocked our front door and went in. I closed the door and opened the carrier. Remus ran out into this wide open empty space and found a rubber band - his favorite cat toy - on the floor. It was all bigger than I had imagined it to be. There was a nice big living room with an archway to the huge dining room. Then there was a swinging door to a tiny breakfast nook and a storage hutch, then the fairly large kitchen with a new gas range and small but fairly new refrigerator. Beyond that was a little mud room, the perfect place for litter boxes. This opened onto a deck with spongy floor boards and wobbly handrail. "I hope the landlord replaces this soon." I said. He did.
Back inside, I went through the other door of the kitchen and entered "the room of doors," a little square in the house that was nothing but doors - to the linen closet, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the office and the kitchen. The bedrooms were bigger than I was anticipating. The bathroom was a shithole. Remus ran in there and cowered on the back side of the tub for the rest of the night.
I hung up the phone and went to the truck, bringing in the litter box and the rest of the stuff from the cab. The screened porch was a great cat lock. I could leave that door open, load everything onto the porch, close the door and open the door to the living room without fear of escaping kitties. I unlocked the back of the truck and began bringing in necessary items for the night: clothes, towels, toiletries, the Air Bed - stuff like that. Then I locked everything up and walked back down Beech Street to Trapelo Road. There I was confronted with a plethora of choices: three pizza and sub joints, two Chinese carry-outs, a seafood place, two convenience stores and - yes - a Dunkin Donuts. In Massachusetts there is a Dunkin Donuts within view pretty much wherever you are. Sometimes two. I opted for one of the Chinese places. It wasn't very good. The other one, of course, was excellent, we found out later that month.
June 20th - very close to the longest day of the year - Remus and I woke up to bright daylight outside. I looked at my watch: 4:30? I got up and fed the boy, then tried to go back to sleep. Before long I was out at the truck, making as little noise as possible. I brought everything inside and stowed it where it would go. I tried to take the steel shelving units to the dank and dark basement (Carmen hated it) down the steps from the mud room, but they wouldn't go. I tried the steps from the outside door, but they wouldn't go. I had to disassemble them all and reassemble them in the basement. Joy.
It was well after noon when I had the truck unloaded and cleaned out, ready to return. I showered, put on clean clothes and struck out for the Budget place in Cambridge. I only took one wrong road at an intersection that sported six ways to go, none of them marked. I figured it out within a quarter mile, and by the time I drove directly through Harvard Square, found Massachusetts Avenue going the right direction, got gas at a tiny station where I had to wait on the street while two guys argued about whose turn it was at the pump, and finally made it to the Budget place, it was after 2:00 and the mileage was seventy six over the allotment. Before I was all the way into the tiny parking lot, a guy came out, took the keys, wrote down the mileage, inspected the truck, signed my contract and sent me into the office.
"So how do I get back to Belmont?" I asked the woman at the counter. She started in with driving directions. "I just dropped off the only vehicle I have," I said. She looked kind of puzzled. She thought I could probably get somewhere near Belmont by Red Line. She thought there might be a Commuter Rail train out of Porter Square Station. I set out walking north on Mass. Ave. and after passing dozens of delicious smelling restaurants, found Harvard Station. I went inside, looking for a system map or something to tell me what my options were. When I got to the bottom of the second escalator I saw it: BUSES 74 and 75 to Belmont - up the ramp. I went up the ramp and waited for the bus. It came eventually, and took me to Belmont Center.
On the way I got a call from Carmen. The closing had gone without a hitch, the house was officially sold. She, her mama and the kitties were spending the night in a motel and striking out early in the morning. I wish I remembered more of her story of their trip. It was a goodie.
The walk from Belmont Center was pretty long. I wasn't looking forward to doing this twice a day. Once home I deposited my map and paperwork and set out again for something to eat. Also, I was primed to look for bus stop signs. It turned out that there was one right there at Trapelo Road and Beech Street: Number 73 to Waverley. Across the street: number 73 to Harvard Square. This was my introduction to a strange truth about the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority: once you know how to get somewhere, you can suddenly see how you could have gotten there much faster and easier. I remembered seeing WAVERLEY on the wall above the bus ramp down. If I'd known Waverley was on Trapelo Road, I could have saved myself a lot of walking. But that's okay. I like to walk.
So that's the story of the move to Massachusetts. The Lawson truck arrived on Friday the 24th at 6:30 am. Carmen arrived at 10:30 am, when the truck was almost empty and the apartment was almost full. All we had left to do was to get set up for the business of living, learn our way around Middlesex County, find jobs and do four years of Seminary. Then we could do all this again. And it was so.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
The End Of The Beginning Part Two
About a month after the Thesis Presentation, in May, 2004, was graduation. Not only was my girl graduating, she was selected to be student speaker at the Adult Education session. We were headed to Boston again, this time with Sandra and Olen, made famous in the entry entitled Adventures in Hauling Luggage. And this time we weren't torturing anybody with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We were torturing them with The Boston Pops, with John Williams as guest conductor.
I was Secret Keeper for our friends from Jacksonville, Pat and Linda, who wanted to surprise Carmen by coming to the graduation. I fed them the pertinent information about when and where the graduation was going to take place. I almost made it to the very edge of the event without letting anything slip.
We arrived on Friday, three days before graduation. We had plans for dinner out with Les and Susan, our friends from Orlando who now lived in Lowell, Mass. We rode the Doubletree Bayside shuttle van to the hotel, which was on the same chunk of land as the Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester, where the graduation extravaganza was being held. We called Les and Susan to let them know we had arrived, checked into our room and got ready to go out to dinner. After a while they came, and they drove us into downtown Boston. It was actually on this occasion that I decided that if I ever moved to Boston, I wasn't going to have a car. The traffic was ridiculous, the roads were in terrible shape, there were no street signs, and downtown was still torn up in the aftermath of the Big Dig. There was some seafood restaurant they had in mind to take us to, but they couldn't find it. We ended up going to Legal Seafood across from the New England Aquarium, right where we had caught our trolley tour and harbor tour a month before. They parked in a garage by the Aquarium, and after we had a very yummy seafood dinner, paid forty bucks to get the car out.
The next morning was time for Carmen to write her speech before Sandra and Olen got in. We had a room with two queen beds so we could all room together for the three nights. Carmen sat in the lounge off of the lobby all morning working on it. I went for a walk. I found the Red Line station and a grocery store. I bought a few snack items - fruit and such - and walked back.
The speech writing took most of the day.
Sandra and Olen arrived and checked in, and then we had to figure out where to eat. We consulted the phone book and my map of Greater Boston, and finally decided to go find a restaurant in Boston's North End, where there are hundreds of Italian restaurants. We took a cab the five or so miles and got out on Hanover Street. On a beautiful Saturday evening in May, there were people lined up out the doors, waiting for tables in the hundreds of restaurants. We walked down the street until we found one with a much shorter line. That was where we ate. We found out why the line was shorter - the food was not very good, but at least the service was lousy. We cabbed back to Dorchester where we watched TV until time to go to sleep.
Early Sunday morning we trooped across the highway and under Interstate 93 to the JFK /U Mass Red Line Station. We went inbound to Park Street Station, then took the Green Line to Government Center. We walked through Quiincy Market and Faniuel Hall to the waterfront and took the same trolley tour that we'd taken a month before. This time, our driver was black, and his spiel included a plethora of information about the contributions and treatment of people of color throughout the history of Boston. We got off the trolley near Beacon Hill to explore a couple of old historic cemetaries. We found out that these grassy plots were used for cattle grazing hundreds of years ago, so the headstones had been moved closer together to facilitate cattle browsing among the graves. The headstones bore no relationship to the location of the actual graves.
We went to Harvard Square by Red Line. While Carmen and Sandra shopped, Olen and I staked out a table at The Border restaurant. We had a lot of chips, salsa and beer before the womenfolk finally came along for our early dinner. We had to get back to the hotel by about 6:00 to get changed and head downtown for the Boston Pops. I was excited to be going to a Pops concert, which completely mystified Sandra and Olen.
The Pops was a great time. John Williams did a program of movie music, featuring Bernard Herrmann, who, among many other credits, scored many of Alfred Hitchcock's movies; and Henry Mancini. Henry's daughter Monica was part of the program, singing "Moon River" and a couple of other Mancini classics. Finally, at the end of the evening, they did John's music from ET, and for the encore a Star Wars medley. Yes, even Sandra and Olen said they enjoyed the Evening At Pops.
It was pouring rain, a big fat hairy thunderstorm when we came out of Symphony Hall. Cabs were hard-fought commodities, but we finally got one. Back at the hotel, we flung the drapes wide open and watched the storm lighting up Greater Boston until it blew itself out. "Cold Mountain" was on Pay Per View, and we watched it.
First Breakfast was easy to find at this hotel. There was an Au Bon Pain in the building. It was good that I got there early, because soon after there were graduates and their families, faculty, speakers and Event Workers arriving hungry. When I went back up to the room, Carmen and Sandra were deep in discussion of a plan to bolt for Salem, Mass. directly after graduation. I had to steer them away from this plan without spilling too many beans about who we might want to have lunch with afterward.
We all got dressed up in our fancy duds and mosied on across the parking lot. Carmen was desperate to find out who her surprise guests might be. She had guessed Pat and Linda, but I had given no indication that she was correct. Soon she felt she had to go to the graduates procession area, and we staked out five seats on the aisle as near the front as we could get.
Eventually, Pat and Linda arrived, and took two seats on the aisle. As it turned out, Carmen's part of the procession came directly down that aisle. When Carmen saw the five of us she burst into tears. Luckily, she had a long time to compose herself before her speech. In fact, this gathering was only the prelude to Graduation. The big name speakers spoke here. Then the show broke up and divided into actual graduation chunks. We plowed our way through the multi-directionally milling crowds over to the Adult Ed section and found the best seats we could get. Sandra made her way up to the stage-right side of the stage brandishing her video camera, determined to get Carmen's speech.
Before things got under way, I saw a tall, thin black man in a nice suit moving toward the stage with a bouquet of flowers. "That looks a lot like Carmen's boss," I said to Olen. The man handed the flowers to a flustered-looking Carmen and went back to his seat.
Of course there were speeches before Carmen's speech. The person who spoke before Carmen was about a foot taller, and the microphone was aimed way up. Not being comfortable with audio equipment, Carmen's method of compensating for this was to stand on her tiptoes. She needed to be louder anyway, the microphone was still aimed away from her, and there were other speeches going on in other sub-graduations inside the Expo Center. I understood her, but only because she had practiced it on me a couple of times. I'm proud to say that six years later, she has learned to project her voice.
As soon as Carmen crossed the stage and was handed her diploma, Je'an Wilson jumped up and headed for the exit. He was a busy Orlando lawyer, after all, and he had a flight back in an hour. I intercepted him, introduced him to Olen and thanked him for coming, and he was out the door and gone.
When it was all over, we six piled into two cabs and hauled ass to Legal Seafood across from the New England Aquarium. A splendid time was had by all. And, Olen and I didn't have to go to Salem. After lunch Pat and Linda went back to their hotel to get ready to fly home, leaving us four to wander.
Olen wanted to get a picture of the Old North Church. We consulted the map and looked up the hill, but couldn't see it from the waterfront. We climbed the hill, still looking. Finally we asked a local, who told us how to get there. We found ourselves on Hanover Street, across from the restaurant from Saturday night. There was Paul Revere on his horse. We had to go around the block to see the famous spire. Olen got his pictures, Sandra got video, and we were done with Boston. Back to Dorchester we went, packed up our stuff and were ready to fly home to begin the next phase of the adventure, applying to Seminaries.
I was Secret Keeper for our friends from Jacksonville, Pat and Linda, who wanted to surprise Carmen by coming to the graduation. I fed them the pertinent information about when and where the graduation was going to take place. I almost made it to the very edge of the event without letting anything slip.
We arrived on Friday, three days before graduation. We had plans for dinner out with Les and Susan, our friends from Orlando who now lived in Lowell, Mass. We rode the Doubletree Bayside shuttle van to the hotel, which was on the same chunk of land as the Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester, where the graduation extravaganza was being held. We called Les and Susan to let them know we had arrived, checked into our room and got ready to go out to dinner. After a while they came, and they drove us into downtown Boston. It was actually on this occasion that I decided that if I ever moved to Boston, I wasn't going to have a car. The traffic was ridiculous, the roads were in terrible shape, there were no street signs, and downtown was still torn up in the aftermath of the Big Dig. There was some seafood restaurant they had in mind to take us to, but they couldn't find it. We ended up going to Legal Seafood across from the New England Aquarium, right where we had caught our trolley tour and harbor tour a month before. They parked in a garage by the Aquarium, and after we had a very yummy seafood dinner, paid forty bucks to get the car out.
The next morning was time for Carmen to write her speech before Sandra and Olen got in. We had a room with two queen beds so we could all room together for the three nights. Carmen sat in the lounge off of the lobby all morning working on it. I went for a walk. I found the Red Line station and a grocery store. I bought a few snack items - fruit and such - and walked back.
The speech writing took most of the day.
Sandra and Olen arrived and checked in, and then we had to figure out where to eat. We consulted the phone book and my map of Greater Boston, and finally decided to go find a restaurant in Boston's North End, where there are hundreds of Italian restaurants. We took a cab the five or so miles and got out on Hanover Street. On a beautiful Saturday evening in May, there were people lined up out the doors, waiting for tables in the hundreds of restaurants. We walked down the street until we found one with a much shorter line. That was where we ate. We found out why the line was shorter - the food was not very good, but at least the service was lousy. We cabbed back to Dorchester where we watched TV until time to go to sleep.
Early Sunday morning we trooped across the highway and under Interstate 93 to the JFK /U Mass Red Line Station. We went inbound to Park Street Station, then took the Green Line to Government Center. We walked through Quiincy Market and Faniuel Hall to the waterfront and took the same trolley tour that we'd taken a month before. This time, our driver was black, and his spiel included a plethora of information about the contributions and treatment of people of color throughout the history of Boston. We got off the trolley near Beacon Hill to explore a couple of old historic cemetaries. We found out that these grassy plots were used for cattle grazing hundreds of years ago, so the headstones had been moved closer together to facilitate cattle browsing among the graves. The headstones bore no relationship to the location of the actual graves.
We went to Harvard Square by Red Line. While Carmen and Sandra shopped, Olen and I staked out a table at The Border restaurant. We had a lot of chips, salsa and beer before the womenfolk finally came along for our early dinner. We had to get back to the hotel by about 6:00 to get changed and head downtown for the Boston Pops. I was excited to be going to a Pops concert, which completely mystified Sandra and Olen.
The Pops was a great time. John Williams did a program of movie music, featuring Bernard Herrmann, who, among many other credits, scored many of Alfred Hitchcock's movies; and Henry Mancini. Henry's daughter Monica was part of the program, singing "Moon River" and a couple of other Mancini classics. Finally, at the end of the evening, they did John's music from ET, and for the encore a Star Wars medley. Yes, even Sandra and Olen said they enjoyed the Evening At Pops.
It was pouring rain, a big fat hairy thunderstorm when we came out of Symphony Hall. Cabs were hard-fought commodities, but we finally got one. Back at the hotel, we flung the drapes wide open and watched the storm lighting up Greater Boston until it blew itself out. "Cold Mountain" was on Pay Per View, and we watched it.
First Breakfast was easy to find at this hotel. There was an Au Bon Pain in the building. It was good that I got there early, because soon after there were graduates and their families, faculty, speakers and Event Workers arriving hungry. When I went back up to the room, Carmen and Sandra were deep in discussion of a plan to bolt for Salem, Mass. directly after graduation. I had to steer them away from this plan without spilling too many beans about who we might want to have lunch with afterward.
We all got dressed up in our fancy duds and mosied on across the parking lot. Carmen was desperate to find out who her surprise guests might be. She had guessed Pat and Linda, but I had given no indication that she was correct. Soon she felt she had to go to the graduates procession area, and we staked out five seats on the aisle as near the front as we could get.
Eventually, Pat and Linda arrived, and took two seats on the aisle. As it turned out, Carmen's part of the procession came directly down that aisle. When Carmen saw the five of us she burst into tears. Luckily, she had a long time to compose herself before her speech. In fact, this gathering was only the prelude to Graduation. The big name speakers spoke here. Then the show broke up and divided into actual graduation chunks. We plowed our way through the multi-directionally milling crowds over to the Adult Ed section and found the best seats we could get. Sandra made her way up to the stage-right side of the stage brandishing her video camera, determined to get Carmen's speech.
Before things got under way, I saw a tall, thin black man in a nice suit moving toward the stage with a bouquet of flowers. "That looks a lot like Carmen's boss," I said to Olen. The man handed the flowers to a flustered-looking Carmen and went back to his seat.
Of course there were speeches before Carmen's speech. The person who spoke before Carmen was about a foot taller, and the microphone was aimed way up. Not being comfortable with audio equipment, Carmen's method of compensating for this was to stand on her tiptoes. She needed to be louder anyway, the microphone was still aimed away from her, and there were other speeches going on in other sub-graduations inside the Expo Center. I understood her, but only because she had practiced it on me a couple of times. I'm proud to say that six years later, she has learned to project her voice.
As soon as Carmen crossed the stage and was handed her diploma, Je'an Wilson jumped up and headed for the exit. He was a busy Orlando lawyer, after all, and he had a flight back in an hour. I intercepted him, introduced him to Olen and thanked him for coming, and he was out the door and gone.
When it was all over, we six piled into two cabs and hauled ass to Legal Seafood across from the New England Aquarium. A splendid time was had by all. And, Olen and I didn't have to go to Salem. After lunch Pat and Linda went back to their hotel to get ready to fly home, leaving us four to wander.
Olen wanted to get a picture of the Old North Church. We consulted the map and looked up the hill, but couldn't see it from the waterfront. We climbed the hill, still looking. Finally we asked a local, who told us how to get there. We found ourselves on Hanover Street, across from the restaurant from Saturday night. There was Paul Revere on his horse. We had to go around the block to see the famous spire. Olen got his pictures, Sandra got video, and we were done with Boston. Back to Dorchester we went, packed up our stuff and were ready to fly home to begin the next phase of the adventure, applying to Seminaries.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The End Of The Beginning Part One
Spring 2004 - The last packet for Lesley University was Carmen's Bachelor's Thesis, a big one about death and dying. She had been a hospice volunteer; she had done several death and dying workshops with co-workers and church people. All in all, it had been a happy-go-lucky six months culminating in a trip to Boston for the three of us - our friend Karen, Carmen and me. Phase one: Carmen's Thesis Presentation at Rolling Ridge Conference Center; Phase Two: exploration of Boston and a night at Symphony Hall.
We flew to Boston in the morning and grabbed a shuttle van to Rolling Ridge at North Andover. We were assigned our sleeping space in a big multi-bed room upstairs. Carmen's presentation was that afternoon, so she went right to work setting up her props and script. As her staff photographer, I went to work taking pictures.
The Thesis Presentation was very well done, with the usual exception: she needed to be louder. All of her stuff needed more volume. The crux of her message was (and still is) "We need each other" as the stained glass needs light (the candle wasn't bright enough) and as the wind chimes need the wind (the fan wasn't strong enough) but we got the message. She got her usual 4.0, paving the way to graduation in a month.
We spent the night in the big multi-bed room upstairs, ate breakfast with the students and faculty, stayed for a couple of other people's presentations (I explored the edge of the pond) and caught the early afternoon shuttle van back to Boston. We stayed in a hotel in Cambridge in an area I know very well nowadays. It's an easy walk from there to the Museum of Science, where I spent about a third of my working days during my four years at Mystic Scenic Studios.
That evening we caught a cab to Symphony Hall, where we participated in the pre-symphony dinner right next to the hall. The BSO was doing an evening of Mahler, with which none of us were familiar. Carmen and I simply enjoyed the experience of a live world class Symphony Orchestra. Karen was fascinated with the violinist near the edge of the stage. He looked as if he could keel over dead and land in her lap at any moment. Our seats were right up front.
The next day we ventured out on public transportation. From this perspective I can tell you we took the Green Line from Lechmere Station, got off at Government Center and walked through Faneuil Hall to the waterfront, where we caught a trolley tour of Boston. This was our first trolley tour, but by no means our last. Well, it was Karen's last one. Every guide on these tours has a personal slant on the history of Boston. This was the "dirt hauling" tour. Our guide was, we guess, descended from laborers who hauled dirt around Boston over the centuries. It used to be a land of hills and swamps. Many of the hills (including Bunker Hill) were leveled off and used to fill swamps. This was the focus of our driver's spiel - how much dirt, hauled from where to where, how many men, how long it took. After the trolley, we had an included-in-the-price harbor tour boat ride, which was a little chilly, but nice when the sun came out.
We flew to Boston in the morning and grabbed a shuttle van to Rolling Ridge at North Andover. We were assigned our sleeping space in a big multi-bed room upstairs. Carmen's presentation was that afternoon, so she went right to work setting up her props and script. As her staff photographer, I went to work taking pictures.
The Thesis Presentation was very well done, with the usual exception: she needed to be louder. All of her stuff needed more volume. The crux of her message was (and still is) "We need each other" as the stained glass needs light (the candle wasn't bright enough) and as the wind chimes need the wind (the fan wasn't strong enough) but we got the message. She got her usual 4.0, paving the way to graduation in a month.
We spent the night in the big multi-bed room upstairs, ate breakfast with the students and faculty, stayed for a couple of other people's presentations (I explored the edge of the pond) and caught the early afternoon shuttle van back to Boston. We stayed in a hotel in Cambridge in an area I know very well nowadays. It's an easy walk from there to the Museum of Science, where I spent about a third of my working days during my four years at Mystic Scenic Studios.
That evening we caught a cab to Symphony Hall, where we participated in the pre-symphony dinner right next to the hall. The BSO was doing an evening of Mahler, with which none of us were familiar. Carmen and I simply enjoyed the experience of a live world class Symphony Orchestra. Karen was fascinated with the violinist near the edge of the stage. He looked as if he could keel over dead and land in her lap at any moment. Our seats were right up front.
The next day we ventured out on public transportation. From this perspective I can tell you we took the Green Line from Lechmere Station, got off at Government Center and walked through Faneuil Hall to the waterfront, where we caught a trolley tour of Boston. This was our first trolley tour, but by no means our last. Well, it was Karen's last one. Every guide on these tours has a personal slant on the history of Boston. This was the "dirt hauling" tour. Our guide was, we guess, descended from laborers who hauled dirt around Boston over the centuries. It used to be a land of hills and swamps. Many of the hills (including Bunker Hill) were leveled off and used to fill swamps. This was the focus of our driver's spiel - how much dirt, hauled from where to where, how many men, how long it took. After the trolley, we had an included-in-the-price harbor tour boat ride, which was a little chilly, but nice when the sun came out.
We shopped our way back through Quincy Market, and ate an early dinner there before Green Lining it back to Lechmere.
An early riser, I was dressed and out walking hours before anybody else was up next morning. I found a grocery store and a CVS, and bought some stuff for my first breakfast. After a while we all came trooping out to Lechmere Station and caught the number 69 bus that takes Cambridge Street through the day-to-day business part of Cambridge all the way to Harvard Square. It passes the Fresh Killed Chicken store. During the time of day we went, the plain folk were out and about. One guy on the bus had a big clock on a chain around his neck like Flave-O-Flave.
This was my first time at Harvard Square, but by no means my last. We shopped at The Coop book store, and a couple of other places Carmen knew, then got on the Red Line outbound to Porter square.
It's a long escalator ride up to street level at Porter. Along the way, the work gloves of the construction crew are bronzed and attached to the housing between escalators. Kinda cool. Carmen has a long list of shops to browse on Massachusetts Avenue from Porter square south. Karen and I went into the shops with her primarily because it had begun to rain. This did not deter us from meandering from shop to shop all the way to Leslie University proper, which I now know is within a few blocks of Harvard Square. She went to the office to straighten out some stuff, and then we trooped all the way back to Porter, shopping in the funky little shops and eating lunch in the student-rich restaurant on Mass. Ave. whose name I can't recall. From Porter Square we grabbed the Red Line to downtown Boston and the Green Line back out to Lechmere. Wow, if I'd only known then what I know now about public transportation in Cambridge/Somerville.
Back at the hotel, we changed out of our wet clothes and tried to figure out what to do for fun on our last night in Greater Boston. Karen wanted to go to Target, but there was none nearby. The person at the front desk told us about Sears over on the other side of the Green Line. It was dark as we made our way around the route described to us. We found the Sears, and Karen bought a bag to haul her souvenirs in. We asked about nearby restaurants, and were directed around the corner to an Italian place (no longer there) and we found it easily. We ordered, but before our food came, Carmen saw a mouse run across the floor between booths and was so freaked she couldn't eat. What a fun night!
We took the hotel shuttle to the airport the next morning, and our adventure (Karen's nightmare?) was over.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The Wings Of The Raven
For three years, Carmen was a student at Leslie University in Cambridge, MA while we still lived and worked in Orlando, FL. Every six months, Spring and Fall, she would fly to Boston, take a shuttle van to Rolling Ridge Conference Center in North Andover, and spend nine days with the professors. She would present the reading, writing and projects she had been working on in her spare time (that's a joke - the law firm worked her sixty to eighty hours a week) and then work out a plan for reading, writing and projects for the next six months. This, combined with the hodge-podge of college credits she had compiled over the preceeding twenty years, finally culminated in a Bachelor's Degree so she could go to Seminary for her Master Of Divinity.
As part of that program, in January of 2003 we flew to Albuquerque, spent one night, then drove a rented Hyundai Elantra to Abiquiu for a silent retreat at Ghost Ranch. This was when she learned that she loves New Mexico.
First we went to Old Town in Albuquerque for some excellent Mexican food and some funky shopping. Yes, she bought pottery. The memorable moment there was wandering into a shop featuring Native American merchandise. The Navajo man at the counter was looking at the newspaper while political talk radio played over the radio. Suddenly, he noticed we were there, whipped around and hit the button that changed the sound system to Native American flute music. Even so, we didn't buy anything there.
On the way back to the hotel, we saw a phenomenon that we have come to expect nowadays: The Sandia Mountains that border the east side of Albuquerque were lit up bright watermelon pink by the setting sun. This did nothing to diminish Carmen's love of New Mexico.
That evening we met some friends for dinner. Carmen had helped their mother in Orlando with paying her bills and keeping track of things. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town. One of them is a member of the church where Carmen is interning now, eight years later.
Bright and early the next morning, armed with my Rand McNally Road Atlas, we found our way up Interstate 25, through Santa Fe, and over to Abiquiu. We checked in, hauled our bags - I don't remember how many - to the room, and the silent retreat began. I was the guy who was charged with handling any situations that required speech, like buying pottery at the gift shop. I was also expedition photographer. We wandered the grounds. There were museum buildings, hiking trails, a labyrinth, a big dining hall and no TV anywhere. Perfect.
On day 2 she felt up to the challenge of hiking up to Chimney Rock. Carmen is not what one would call a physical person. Her idea of a hike is from Chico's to Avenue in the mall, so I was impressed when she decided to tackle this mountain. We found the trailhead and set out, over huge boulders and up steep slopes. About halfway up she sat down to rest. Rest turned into meditation. Meditation turned into one of those moments when one is acutely aware of all that is in the universe - a direct clear connection. The silence was nearly absolute until she became aware of the rhythmic whoosh of wings. She looked up. A raven flew directly over her head. We now knew enough about Native theology to know that Raven is the Creator - and the Trickster.
We came back down the mountain, had some lunch, she walked the labyrinth, and the day passed (mostly) in silence. That evening we called my brother in the nursing home in Denver. It was his birthday. My parents were there, and very puzzled about what the heck we were doing in New Mexico. A few months later, Carmen showed them the Ghost Ranch Silent Retreat scrapbook she'd made for presentation to Leslie U, and her grade for the term (4.0) and they understood.
Early in the morning on the third day we packed up the Elantra and headed back. Carmen hated to leave the Land Of Enchantment, but we resolved to return one day. And here we are.
As part of that program, in January of 2003 we flew to Albuquerque, spent one night, then drove a rented Hyundai Elantra to Abiquiu for a silent retreat at Ghost Ranch. This was when she learned that she loves New Mexico.
First we went to Old Town in Albuquerque for some excellent Mexican food and some funky shopping. Yes, she bought pottery. The memorable moment there was wandering into a shop featuring Native American merchandise. The Navajo man at the counter was looking at the newspaper while political talk radio played over the radio. Suddenly, he noticed we were there, whipped around and hit the button that changed the sound system to Native American flute music. Even so, we didn't buy anything there.
On the way back to the hotel, we saw a phenomenon that we have come to expect nowadays: The Sandia Mountains that border the east side of Albuquerque were lit up bright watermelon pink by the setting sun. This did nothing to diminish Carmen's love of New Mexico.
That evening we met some friends for dinner. Carmen had helped their mother in Orlando with paying her bills and keeping track of things. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town. One of them is a member of the church where Carmen is interning now, eight years later.
Bright and early the next morning, armed with my Rand McNally Road Atlas, we found our way up Interstate 25, through Santa Fe, and over to Abiquiu. We checked in, hauled our bags - I don't remember how many - to the room, and the silent retreat began. I was the guy who was charged with handling any situations that required speech, like buying pottery at the gift shop. I was also expedition photographer. We wandered the grounds. There were museum buildings, hiking trails, a labyrinth, a big dining hall and no TV anywhere. Perfect.
On day 2 she felt up to the challenge of hiking up to Chimney Rock. Carmen is not what one would call a physical person. Her idea of a hike is from Chico's to Avenue in the mall, so I was impressed when she decided to tackle this mountain. We found the trailhead and set out, over huge boulders and up steep slopes. About halfway up she sat down to rest. Rest turned into meditation. Meditation turned into one of those moments when one is acutely aware of all that is in the universe - a direct clear connection. The silence was nearly absolute until she became aware of the rhythmic whoosh of wings. She looked up. A raven flew directly over her head. We now knew enough about Native theology to know that Raven is the Creator - and the Trickster.
We came back down the mountain, had some lunch, she walked the labyrinth, and the day passed (mostly) in silence. That evening we called my brother in the nursing home in Denver. It was his birthday. My parents were there, and very puzzled about what the heck we were doing in New Mexico. A few months later, Carmen showed them the Ghost Ranch Silent Retreat scrapbook she'd made for presentation to Leslie U, and her grade for the term (4.0) and they understood.
Early in the morning on the third day we packed up the Elantra and headed back. Carmen hated to leave the Land Of Enchantment, but we resolved to return one day. And here we are.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Multiple Myeloma
John Emerson is dead as a doornail. This must be distinctly understood or one could think he might see this posting and kill me in my sleep. A shoe box-sized box with his ashes in it resides in my parents' attic, directly above the kitchen, where a beautiful urn containing the ashes of Charlie the cat stands in a place of honor.
My brother was one of those guys who never fit in. He was taller than most, and for most of his life he weighed over three hundred pounds. He was something of a genious about computers, which stood him well during the seventies and eighties. The pinnacle of his career was during the Skylab and early Space Shuttle preparations, when he programmed for Bendix Corp. at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, MD. But when the computer age became routine stuff, his genious became obsolete. Bendix let him go during the "downsizing" era of the eighties. He was reduced to routine programming of routine computers, and he took too long trying to make everything perfect. Being a generally abrasive kind of guy, he had trouble keeping a job.
He had been going to therapists since his teen-age years, trying to straighten his kinked-up self out. Unfortunately, he wasn't really interested in fixing himself. He shopped around until he found therapists who were willing to take his money and tell him it was all his parents' fault. Therefore, all he had to do was to be angry at our parents and he was as happy as he wanted to be.
The final blow to his fragile employability came when the company in Washington where he worked decided to close that branch and retreat to the main office in Denver. They moved John and his wife out there and within a short time, went completely out of business. His standard depression became so much worse, and his willingness to help himself became so much less, that his patient and long-suffering second wife Rachel left him. This did not improve his mood. By the time this story began, John Gilbert Emerson's soul was so shriveled that he wouldn't even talk to his evil vicious parents more than once a month, and that was as unpleasant as he could possibly make it for them. These were my parents, too, and I never knew they were evil and vicious. Still don't.
All of that was to say that when, in late October of 2002, my parents couldn't get ahold of him and he wouldn't return their calls, it was some weeks before they were alarmed about it. At last they called Rachel, and asked her if she could find him. She did. He was in the hospital in Aurora, but the staff wouldn't tell her why. I invoked my powers, and within hours was on a bus to Aurora, Colorado.
Due to the nature of this blog, I feel compelled to describe some features of the trip out. I was very surprised to find that I had to show ID and there were itinerary dates and times on my tickets. I had to give them a date and time for my return trip as well, which they assured me I could change if I needed to. There was baggage screening and ID checking at every bus change. In short, it was a far cry from my bus trips of the seventies, when my ticket would get me there no matter who I was or how long I stayed at any junction point. I went by bus to avoid this kind of treatment. But at least it took longer than flying.
I changed buses in Mobile to a bus that went northwest to Shreveport (where the restrooms were being overhauled so they had big multi-hole portable restrooms outside) and Dallas, and changed there to go north to Denver. One more bus change got me to Aurora. I rolled my big blue bag inside the bus station and found the pay phone (remember those?) where I found the phone book, which had maps in the front which told me how to find the hospital. I walked the three or so miles to the hospital, asked about John Emerson, and found his room. It was empty - even the bed was gone. I asked at the nurses' station. They directed me to the dialysis unit. I left my bag in his room and headed for Dialysis. There he was, with tubes implanted in his chest, having a dialysis. He was pretty much out of it, but he recognized me. I told him I was there to find out what was going on. He seemed peeved that his privacy was being invaded. I went downstairs to the cafeteria for some lunch. That's where Rachel found me. She filled me on on what she had learned since three days before.
Erik, as his friends had called him since the late seventies (with his long, wild, flaming red hair and wild red beard he looked like a viking,) had been going to doctors for years about severe pain in his bones. Some said to take Tylenol. Some said to take calcium supplements. A couple of weeks ago, he had been referred to an oncologist, who took a look at the x rays and other tests and said, "Get thee to the hospital, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars." That's not really what he said. Turns out he had a rare cancer called Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that builds pockets of plasma in your bones and splits and cracks them. In addition, it clogs up your kidneys. Add all that to his ongoing insulin-dependant diabetes, and you have one severely fucked up individual. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it was in stage three, and the average life expectancy for his situation was two years. Hmmm.
Rachel had his keys, which she bequeathed to me, and she took me to his apartment where I could hole up during my stay. She suggested I use his car, but when I tried to start it, the horn blasted and nothing else happened, no matter what I did. We returned to the hospital and found him back in his room. He got a wild look in his eye when we told him I was going to hang out in his apartment, but he calmed down enough to tell me that the car had an anti-theft system. One merely had to flick the lights on and off to make it startable. I was glad he was lucid enough to tell me that.
I soon found out why he was so worried about me staying at his place. It was filled to the gills with porn - magazines, videos, calendars, posters, paperback books, sex toys - probably a couple thousand items of pornographic merchandise, much of it devoted to S&M. I assured him I wasn't going to tell the parents about it. And during my off hours I spent a lot of time boxing up the visible stuff out in the living room and hiding it in the bedroom. He seemed to think he would be going home soon. Everybody else in the loop knew that this was not the case.
My "on" hours were spent talking to his doctors, nurses and friends and keeping a notebook filled with all the information I learned. I informed Carmen and my parents every step of the way, but left out the porn.
The Aurora South Hospital staff seemed to think that John would be better off at Aurora North where they had a program that featured co-ordinated care of multiple problems. It sounded like a good idea. I overstayed my return ticket by one day to see him transferred and settled in at Aurora North, got my ticket changed to the new itinerary and spent two days going home by way of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee. It made me happy to take a different route home.
My parents decided that they needed to go out there and take care of John's situation. On Thanksgiving Day they loaded up the car with their necessary items, including Charlie the cat (who was still alive) and began driving to Denver. They took the southernmost route as far as they could, trying to avoid snow and ice, then turned north through Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where they ran into a winter storm that held them up for a while. I believe it took them four days to make the trip.
It was evening rush hour when they hit Denver traffic, and they were completely lost. They pulled off the Interstate and called Rachel. She drove to where they were and led them to her house, where she cooked them a nice dinner and put them up for the night. The next morning she took them to the apartment and the hospital. They don't know what would have become of them if Rachel hadn't been there to rescue them.
They stayed until the middle of February. During that time the medical and insurance professionals decided that John needed to be in a nursing home. They relocated him to downtown Denver into a home with dialysis technology on the premises. Every day my parents drove from Aurora to downtown Denver to hang with John and monitor his care. I guess they ARE vicious and evil. Who knew?
Eventually it was decided (by the insurance professionals) that John could live on his own. The only problem: his apartment had many steps impeding wheelchair accessibility. My dad inquired about accessible apartments, but there were none vacant in the complex. He tried the next complex over. They had one. He rented it, made arrangements with a moving company, and they began packing up his stuff to move about a thousand yards west of where it was. My parents soon learned the extent of John's pornographic proclivities. My dad said to me, "I learned things about my son that I wish I didn't know."
They called at one point and told me that they had to go home soon and take care of some things in preparation for making their spring migration from Vero Beach, Florida to Blairsville, Georgia. Could I come to Colorado for a couple of weeks, just to get John set up and running in his new apartment? What could I say? On Valentine's Day I flew to Denver. I was picked up at the airport by Rachel, who took me to the new apartment and then went home. My parents were still there, car and cat loaded up and ready to depart. After a bit a van arrived with John in his wheelchair. We rolled him into his new place, with boxes piled to the ceiling everywhere, and our parents hauled ass for home. I was flabberghasted to hear my brother say, "There go the most wonderful people in the whole world." He soon forgot about that description.
If you'll remember my previous posting about lost luggage, you'll remember that my big blue rolling bag was at this time at a ski resort many miles away, in the posession of an idiot who didn't have the sense to read the claim check on my bag, which was identical to his bag. It would be almost two days before I saw my stuff again. Meanwhile, we muddled through as best we could. The worst of it was dialysis. We had to somehow get him transported from his apartment to the dialysis place about a half mile away. His little Corolla was practically useless. Getting him in and out of it was ridiculously difficult. If we called a cab company, they were as likely to send an impossible car as a van or SUV. I signed him up for the transit department program, but that would take many days to process and implement. As it turned out, on my last day of my two week stay, he was taken to the transit facility to be tested and processed. When I left on the 28th, he was all signed up to be picked up and taken to dialysis whenever he needed to go. In the meantime, Rachel traded us her Rav 4 to use on dialysis days.
There were many challenges during those two weeks. John had infections in his dialysis tube implantations, he had heart problems, we had a face-first spill out of the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. When I left, Rachel asked when I would be back to take him away. I didn't know.
The next big turn of events was the day his physical therapist came and couldn't get any answer at the door or when she called. Rachel came over and they found him on the toilet with not enough strength to get up. Within hours he was back in a nursing home, and Carmen and I were making plans to get him into a nursing home in Orlando.
In the middle of March I was back in Aurora. On Saint Patrick's Day the moving van came and hauled his stuff away. That same day I got a Notary to meet me and Rachel at the nursing home to notarize Powers Of Attorney so I could legally make arrangements for all of the medical and government stuff that needed to be cleared for him to arrive, take up residence in the Orlando nursing home, and get his dialysis. His Medicaid and Social Security Disability went straight to the nursing home and other medical entities. Carmen spent thousands of hours on the phone getting all of this set up. In April, my dad flew to Denver and shepherded John to the plane and on to Orlando. Our Colorado mess was over. Now we had the mess right there in Orlando.
I visited him pretty often. I went to his storage unit and retrieved whatever he wanted out of his huge heap of stuff. I bought whatever he needed that I couldn't find in his stuff. He made some friends in the home. Things were going well, I thought. But then, it turned out that John had withheld information about his finances. He had a "secret account" in Colorado he hadn't disclosed to the Medicaid people. They sent him a letter about it. He tried once to call the guy, but he wasn't there. Long story short, they stopped his Medicaid. Carmen was livid. After all the countless hours she spent getting it set up for him, his arrogance and laziness got it cancelled.
Luckily, he'd been courting a woman on an internet dating site. When his nursing home welcome was worn out, he moved in with her! They moved his stuff to a different storage unit, he put her name on his credit card, and made her his medical proxy. Suddenly, I was off the hook!
It was about six months later that he became so sick that he had to go into the hospital. He got gradually worse, spending a lot of the time in Intensive Care. His heart finally gave out on Thursday, August 12th, 2004, the day before Hurricane Charlie tore through Orlando, taking down 700 miles of power lines.
A year and ten months after this saga began, it was over. The internet girlfriend had possession of all of his crap and all of his debt. I went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, and that was the end of it. There were no tears and no memorial. He was just dead. He still is.
My brother was one of those guys who never fit in. He was taller than most, and for most of his life he weighed over three hundred pounds. He was something of a genious about computers, which stood him well during the seventies and eighties. The pinnacle of his career was during the Skylab and early Space Shuttle preparations, when he programmed for Bendix Corp. at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, MD. But when the computer age became routine stuff, his genious became obsolete. Bendix let him go during the "downsizing" era of the eighties. He was reduced to routine programming of routine computers, and he took too long trying to make everything perfect. Being a generally abrasive kind of guy, he had trouble keeping a job.
He had been going to therapists since his teen-age years, trying to straighten his kinked-up self out. Unfortunately, he wasn't really interested in fixing himself. He shopped around until he found therapists who were willing to take his money and tell him it was all his parents' fault. Therefore, all he had to do was to be angry at our parents and he was as happy as he wanted to be.
The final blow to his fragile employability came when the company in Washington where he worked decided to close that branch and retreat to the main office in Denver. They moved John and his wife out there and within a short time, went completely out of business. His standard depression became so much worse, and his willingness to help himself became so much less, that his patient and long-suffering second wife Rachel left him. This did not improve his mood. By the time this story began, John Gilbert Emerson's soul was so shriveled that he wouldn't even talk to his evil vicious parents more than once a month, and that was as unpleasant as he could possibly make it for them. These were my parents, too, and I never knew they were evil and vicious. Still don't.
All of that was to say that when, in late October of 2002, my parents couldn't get ahold of him and he wouldn't return their calls, it was some weeks before they were alarmed about it. At last they called Rachel, and asked her if she could find him. She did. He was in the hospital in Aurora, but the staff wouldn't tell her why. I invoked my powers, and within hours was on a bus to Aurora, Colorado.
Due to the nature of this blog, I feel compelled to describe some features of the trip out. I was very surprised to find that I had to show ID and there were itinerary dates and times on my tickets. I had to give them a date and time for my return trip as well, which they assured me I could change if I needed to. There was baggage screening and ID checking at every bus change. In short, it was a far cry from my bus trips of the seventies, when my ticket would get me there no matter who I was or how long I stayed at any junction point. I went by bus to avoid this kind of treatment. But at least it took longer than flying.
I changed buses in Mobile to a bus that went northwest to Shreveport (where the restrooms were being overhauled so they had big multi-hole portable restrooms outside) and Dallas, and changed there to go north to Denver. One more bus change got me to Aurora. I rolled my big blue bag inside the bus station and found the pay phone (remember those?) where I found the phone book, which had maps in the front which told me how to find the hospital. I walked the three or so miles to the hospital, asked about John Emerson, and found his room. It was empty - even the bed was gone. I asked at the nurses' station. They directed me to the dialysis unit. I left my bag in his room and headed for Dialysis. There he was, with tubes implanted in his chest, having a dialysis. He was pretty much out of it, but he recognized me. I told him I was there to find out what was going on. He seemed peeved that his privacy was being invaded. I went downstairs to the cafeteria for some lunch. That's where Rachel found me. She filled me on on what she had learned since three days before.
Erik, as his friends had called him since the late seventies (with his long, wild, flaming red hair and wild red beard he looked like a viking,) had been going to doctors for years about severe pain in his bones. Some said to take Tylenol. Some said to take calcium supplements. A couple of weeks ago, he had been referred to an oncologist, who took a look at the x rays and other tests and said, "Get thee to the hospital, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars." That's not really what he said. Turns out he had a rare cancer called Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that builds pockets of plasma in your bones and splits and cracks them. In addition, it clogs up your kidneys. Add all that to his ongoing insulin-dependant diabetes, and you have one severely fucked up individual. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it was in stage three, and the average life expectancy for his situation was two years. Hmmm.
Rachel had his keys, which she bequeathed to me, and she took me to his apartment where I could hole up during my stay. She suggested I use his car, but when I tried to start it, the horn blasted and nothing else happened, no matter what I did. We returned to the hospital and found him back in his room. He got a wild look in his eye when we told him I was going to hang out in his apartment, but he calmed down enough to tell me that the car had an anti-theft system. One merely had to flick the lights on and off to make it startable. I was glad he was lucid enough to tell me that.
I soon found out why he was so worried about me staying at his place. It was filled to the gills with porn - magazines, videos, calendars, posters, paperback books, sex toys - probably a couple thousand items of pornographic merchandise, much of it devoted to S&M. I assured him I wasn't going to tell the parents about it. And during my off hours I spent a lot of time boxing up the visible stuff out in the living room and hiding it in the bedroom. He seemed to think he would be going home soon. Everybody else in the loop knew that this was not the case.
My "on" hours were spent talking to his doctors, nurses and friends and keeping a notebook filled with all the information I learned. I informed Carmen and my parents every step of the way, but left out the porn.
The Aurora South Hospital staff seemed to think that John would be better off at Aurora North where they had a program that featured co-ordinated care of multiple problems. It sounded like a good idea. I overstayed my return ticket by one day to see him transferred and settled in at Aurora North, got my ticket changed to the new itinerary and spent two days going home by way of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee. It made me happy to take a different route home.
My parents decided that they needed to go out there and take care of John's situation. On Thanksgiving Day they loaded up the car with their necessary items, including Charlie the cat (who was still alive) and began driving to Denver. They took the southernmost route as far as they could, trying to avoid snow and ice, then turned north through Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where they ran into a winter storm that held them up for a while. I believe it took them four days to make the trip.
It was evening rush hour when they hit Denver traffic, and they were completely lost. They pulled off the Interstate and called Rachel. She drove to where they were and led them to her house, where she cooked them a nice dinner and put them up for the night. The next morning she took them to the apartment and the hospital. They don't know what would have become of them if Rachel hadn't been there to rescue them.
They stayed until the middle of February. During that time the medical and insurance professionals decided that John needed to be in a nursing home. They relocated him to downtown Denver into a home with dialysis technology on the premises. Every day my parents drove from Aurora to downtown Denver to hang with John and monitor his care. I guess they ARE vicious and evil. Who knew?
Eventually it was decided (by the insurance professionals) that John could live on his own. The only problem: his apartment had many steps impeding wheelchair accessibility. My dad inquired about accessible apartments, but there were none vacant in the complex. He tried the next complex over. They had one. He rented it, made arrangements with a moving company, and they began packing up his stuff to move about a thousand yards west of where it was. My parents soon learned the extent of John's pornographic proclivities. My dad said to me, "I learned things about my son that I wish I didn't know."
They called at one point and told me that they had to go home soon and take care of some things in preparation for making their spring migration from Vero Beach, Florida to Blairsville, Georgia. Could I come to Colorado for a couple of weeks, just to get John set up and running in his new apartment? What could I say? On Valentine's Day I flew to Denver. I was picked up at the airport by Rachel, who took me to the new apartment and then went home. My parents were still there, car and cat loaded up and ready to depart. After a bit a van arrived with John in his wheelchair. We rolled him into his new place, with boxes piled to the ceiling everywhere, and our parents hauled ass for home. I was flabberghasted to hear my brother say, "There go the most wonderful people in the whole world." He soon forgot about that description.
If you'll remember my previous posting about lost luggage, you'll remember that my big blue rolling bag was at this time at a ski resort many miles away, in the posession of an idiot who didn't have the sense to read the claim check on my bag, which was identical to his bag. It would be almost two days before I saw my stuff again. Meanwhile, we muddled through as best we could. The worst of it was dialysis. We had to somehow get him transported from his apartment to the dialysis place about a half mile away. His little Corolla was practically useless. Getting him in and out of it was ridiculously difficult. If we called a cab company, they were as likely to send an impossible car as a van or SUV. I signed him up for the transit department program, but that would take many days to process and implement. As it turned out, on my last day of my two week stay, he was taken to the transit facility to be tested and processed. When I left on the 28th, he was all signed up to be picked up and taken to dialysis whenever he needed to go. In the meantime, Rachel traded us her Rav 4 to use on dialysis days.
There were many challenges during those two weeks. John had infections in his dialysis tube implantations, he had heart problems, we had a face-first spill out of the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. When I left, Rachel asked when I would be back to take him away. I didn't know.
The next big turn of events was the day his physical therapist came and couldn't get any answer at the door or when she called. Rachel came over and they found him on the toilet with not enough strength to get up. Within hours he was back in a nursing home, and Carmen and I were making plans to get him into a nursing home in Orlando.
In the middle of March I was back in Aurora. On Saint Patrick's Day the moving van came and hauled his stuff away. That same day I got a Notary to meet me and Rachel at the nursing home to notarize Powers Of Attorney so I could legally make arrangements for all of the medical and government stuff that needed to be cleared for him to arrive, take up residence in the Orlando nursing home, and get his dialysis. His Medicaid and Social Security Disability went straight to the nursing home and other medical entities. Carmen spent thousands of hours on the phone getting all of this set up. In April, my dad flew to Denver and shepherded John to the plane and on to Orlando. Our Colorado mess was over. Now we had the mess right there in Orlando.
I visited him pretty often. I went to his storage unit and retrieved whatever he wanted out of his huge heap of stuff. I bought whatever he needed that I couldn't find in his stuff. He made some friends in the home. Things were going well, I thought. But then, it turned out that John had withheld information about his finances. He had a "secret account" in Colorado he hadn't disclosed to the Medicaid people. They sent him a letter about it. He tried once to call the guy, but he wasn't there. Long story short, they stopped his Medicaid. Carmen was livid. After all the countless hours she spent getting it set up for him, his arrogance and laziness got it cancelled.
Luckily, he'd been courting a woman on an internet dating site. When his nursing home welcome was worn out, he moved in with her! They moved his stuff to a different storage unit, he put her name on his credit card, and made her his medical proxy. Suddenly, I was off the hook!
It was about six months later that he became so sick that he had to go into the hospital. He got gradually worse, spending a lot of the time in Intensive Care. His heart finally gave out on Thursday, August 12th, 2004, the day before Hurricane Charlie tore through Orlando, taking down 700 miles of power lines.
A year and ten months after this saga began, it was over. The internet girlfriend had possession of all of his crap and all of his debt. I went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, and that was the end of it. There were no tears and no memorial. He was just dead. He still is.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Adventures In Hauling Luggage
Planning began in December of 2000. Carmen got a big ol' bonus from the law firm, and she wanted us to go to Alaska. She bought books, she looked up cruises and tours, and she tried to lure me into the planning process. Me? All I needed to do was to put my feet on the ground, and the forty nine continental states were mine! I did admit that it was a long way to go just for that.
She finally decided on Holland America's seven day package, including a cruise from Vancouver, stopping in Juneau for a local tour that included a visit to Mendenhall Glacier and then a wildlife cruise, then on to Skagway, where we would abandon ship. From Skagway we would take the White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railway over the mountains to Yukon Territory and a bus to Whitehorse, YT. Then we would fly to Anchorage, bus to Denali National Park and take the train back to Anchorage. From there we were supposed to fly home, according to Holland America, but Carmen wanted to go to Seward. So she booked us a round trip train ride and two nights in a Bed & Breakfast in Seward. All of this was reserved and paid for in January.
Then she invited her mom and dad to go with us. They hemmed and hawed about it, but finally booked themselves on the same Holland America schedule with us, but not the Seward part.
Wednesday, August first was our departure date. Our itinerary changed planes with a one-hour layover in Denver. My brother lived in Denver. Carmen thought we should tell him we'd be there in case he wanted to come hang out with us. What the heck, it was only an hour. I acquiesced. At some point Carmen asked me what I thought the in-flight movie might be. We had just seen Shrek with a bunch of church friends. "Well, it won't be Shrek," I said matter-of-factly, "it's too new."
We left with five bags. Two weeks in Alaska requires five bags. Part of one of them was my stuff. The cab driver who drove us to the Orlando airport earned his tip. Luckily, this was August 2001 and not a month and a half later. We checked four bags and carried one on with no security issues. The movie was Shrek.
My brother did show up at Denver airport and hung out with us for about forty five minutes until we were called to board our flight to Vancouver. It was a not-too-unpleasant visit, rare in the years since the early 90s, after his company moved him from Laurel, MD to Aurora, CO and then cut him loose. More about him in my next entry from 2002, "Multiple Myeloma."
The flight to Vancouver was breathtaking, flying over the mountainous northwestern US and into British Columbia. Good thing the view out the window was so good, because the movie was Shrek. We landed in Vancouver airport and were treated to decor unlike anything we've ever seen before or since. As a scenery and exhibits guy, I was fascinated with the construction of dozens of museum-like scenes of various sorts of British Columbia dwellings and structures. I would have taken pictures, but of course I was hauling five bags toward Customs.
Customs was remarkably easy. Our passports were still good from '97, and we didn't look like anything but American tourists happy to leave a bushel of US dollars behind us in Canada. We caught a cab, and rode with a happy Vancouver transplant from the Middle East who raved about his city all the way to the hotel, which was on the waterfront within easy walking distance of the cruise ship port. We hauled our stuff up to our room, stretched out for a while, then went walking, looking for Stanley Park. We were told several times to keep following the seawall. It turned out to be a pretty long walk, but it was worth it.
We took the horse-drawn trolley tour of the beautiful park. We recommend it, especially if you've expended all of your walking energy getting there and still have to get back to the hotel. One of the two horses had been in a movie once. He seemed to feel superior to the other. Periodically we could notice that his traces were slack - he was letting the other horse pull the whole load. Our driver had to flick her whip to encourage him to pull his weight.
We saw eagles and totem poles, many dozens of Canada Geese and billions of flowers. The park is nearly surrounded by water, and Lions Gate Bridge takes you from the north end of the park over to North Vancouver. The trolley didn't go there.
We stopped in a waterfront restaurant on the way back. The food was okay, but at least the price was outrageous. Finally we got back to the hotel and tried to sleep. We didn't have much luck, especially when Sandra and Olen arrived for a visit after their delayed flight from Houston finally got them to Vancouver. We made some plans for the morning - Carmen wanted to go to the Capillano Suspension Footbridge in North Vancouver, and we wanted them to see Stanley Park. We were scheduled to arrive at the cruise dock at 11:00 in the morning, so we had time for all of this if we got an early start.
After checking out, leaving our luggage at the front desk (we had quite an impressive heap of it now!) and an early breakfast at the hotel, Olen arranged for a limousine to take us to the footbridge, wait for us and take us back to the hotel and over to the cruise ship with our luggage. "He's going to need a bigger limo," I said to Olen.
The limo ride through Stanley Park wasn't nearly as nice as the trolley tour - we mostly stayed on the main road - but we did stop at a couple of picturesque spots and took picturesque pictures. The Lions Gate Bridge was high and a little scary for us bridge-o-phobes, but the Capillano Suspension Footbridge was very cool, very high, and hardly scary at all to me. Others in our party were more nervous about it, but we all crossed over and back. Then our driver took us up to the highest point in North Vancouver with a spectacular view of the bay and the city. We could see our cruise ship parked in its berth across the bay. We guessed it was time to go.
The trunk wouldn't close. Our driver figured, and we agreed that for the short distance we were going, the steaming heap of luggage would be all right. It was.
Our first experience with the Holland America process turned out to be pretty typical: it was a long wait in a big concrete room with no entertainment other than the people coming around to try to sell extra amenities such as bottles of wine. They offered onboard massages, which Sandra and Carmen signed up for. Party by party we were called up to a table where our reservations were verified and we received our cruise package including ID cards, ship maps, event schedules and tour itineraries. After several hours we were sent on through Customs. The ship was part of the United States, since our next opportunity to exit (on dry land) would be Juneau. We had trouble with our film. The Customs and security people dusted every roll to make sure they weren't explosives. Did I mention that this was a month and a half BEFORE security was stepped way up?
Everyone was starving by the time we got on the ship at around 2:00. One restaurant was open and almost two thousand of us were trying to get some lunch. Luckily, more food sources opened before anybody died of starvation. After that, there was food available pretty much everywhere on the ship at pretty much any time of day or night.
We went to our rooms - on different decks - to stow our stuff before heading out to the Lido Deck for the Casting Off Party at 4:00. It started about 4:30. The fun directors were introduced, and some loud music began. We actually got underway some time after 5:00, to great fanfare. We all went to our cabins only to be called out again for lifeboat and life vest drill. After that was over it was time to eat again.
We had reservations in the fancy dining room. Sandra and Olen changed their assigned table to join us at our assigned table. Also at our table was a couple from Lethbridge, Alberta. Lethbridge had been home to a double A minor league Dodgers team during the years I did a lot of work for the Dodgers in the early eighties. They had been big fans, and he'd worked for the Dodgers in Lethbridge, so we had a lot to talk aboot. That's how they said "about." Aboot.
Early in the evening it was time for the ship's naturalist to tell us, in words and pictures, what sorts of wildlives we could expect to see on the way and in Alaska. He had no pictures of himself in a Superman costume, but only because he hadn't thought of it. His most memorable line: "Some black bears are brown, some brown bears are black. The way you can tell which is which - if a bear is chasing you and you climb a tree, a black bear will climb up after you. A brown bear will just push the tree over."
Later on there was a song and dance extravaganza on the main stage. It was moderately entertaining. After a late night snack, we all went to bed.
Friday was a long day with nearly zero scenery other than a thin strip of brown and green at the eastern edge of the ocean. I got up at 5:30 and went out in search of my first breakfast. Afterward I returned to our cabin and waited for the other three to get ready for their first, my second breakfast. We were eating by some big windows, and I could occasionally spot a fin breaking the surface for an instant while the others weren't looking. I would report this, everyone would look, and see nothing. "There it is!" I'd say. They'd look. "There it is again." None of them ever saw these Dall's Porpoise but me.
I checked the movies- they were playing "Chocolat" and..."Shrek." I went to see Chocolat again while Carmen laid out on the deck. She got a sunburn out there. Came from Florida and got a sunburn in the coastal waters of British Columbia. After the movie was over, and before Shrek could start, I went to the same auditorium where the naturalist had been and found Carmen there to watch the Tlingit story teller. She was very entertaining. Then Carmen found Sandra and they went for their massages. I went up to the upper pool deck for some lunch.
Friday evening was the fancy dress dinner, or "the penguin party" as we called it. That was one thing we were definitely not going to. The four of us ordered room service and we ate down in Sandra and Olen's room. Afterward there was another song and dance thing. I went to see it, a smear of blue jeans among the sea of penguins. The coolest part was that during the show we passed out of Canadian waters and into Alaskan. The ship made some sharp turns and a barely perceptible stop to let off the Canadian pilots and bring on the US pilots. To us in the seats it was about twenty minutes of slightly strange bumps and rolls. To the dancers on stage, it was an invisible obstacle course. It's hard to dance when you're not sure where the floor will be under your next step.
Saturday morning I had my early breakfast as usual, and waited around in our cabin for the move to second breakfast. There were two big events today. First, at 11:00 the ship was passing through prime feeding grounds for humpback whales - there was a whale-watching extravaganza hosted by Mr. Natural outside on the deck. Then, in late afternoon, we were stopping in Juneau. I was ready ready ready to get the hell off of that floating prison.
She finally decided on Holland America's seven day package, including a cruise from Vancouver, stopping in Juneau for a local tour that included a visit to Mendenhall Glacier and then a wildlife cruise, then on to Skagway, where we would abandon ship. From Skagway we would take the White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railway over the mountains to Yukon Territory and a bus to Whitehorse, YT. Then we would fly to Anchorage, bus to Denali National Park and take the train back to Anchorage. From there we were supposed to fly home, according to Holland America, but Carmen wanted to go to Seward. So she booked us a round trip train ride and two nights in a Bed & Breakfast in Seward. All of this was reserved and paid for in January.
Then she invited her mom and dad to go with us. They hemmed and hawed about it, but finally booked themselves on the same Holland America schedule with us, but not the Seward part.
Wednesday, August first was our departure date. Our itinerary changed planes with a one-hour layover in Denver. My brother lived in Denver. Carmen thought we should tell him we'd be there in case he wanted to come hang out with us. What the heck, it was only an hour. I acquiesced. At some point Carmen asked me what I thought the in-flight movie might be. We had just seen Shrek with a bunch of church friends. "Well, it won't be Shrek," I said matter-of-factly, "it's too new."
We left with five bags. Two weeks in Alaska requires five bags. Part of one of them was my stuff. The cab driver who drove us to the Orlando airport earned his tip. Luckily, this was August 2001 and not a month and a half later. We checked four bags and carried one on with no security issues. The movie was Shrek.
My brother did show up at Denver airport and hung out with us for about forty five minutes until we were called to board our flight to Vancouver. It was a not-too-unpleasant visit, rare in the years since the early 90s, after his company moved him from Laurel, MD to Aurora, CO and then cut him loose. More about him in my next entry from 2002, "Multiple Myeloma."
The flight to Vancouver was breathtaking, flying over the mountainous northwestern US and into British Columbia. Good thing the view out the window was so good, because the movie was Shrek. We landed in Vancouver airport and were treated to decor unlike anything we've ever seen before or since. As a scenery and exhibits guy, I was fascinated with the construction of dozens of museum-like scenes of various sorts of British Columbia dwellings and structures. I would have taken pictures, but of course I was hauling five bags toward Customs.
Customs was remarkably easy. Our passports were still good from '97, and we didn't look like anything but American tourists happy to leave a bushel of US dollars behind us in Canada. We caught a cab, and rode with a happy Vancouver transplant from the Middle East who raved about his city all the way to the hotel, which was on the waterfront within easy walking distance of the cruise ship port. We hauled our stuff up to our room, stretched out for a while, then went walking, looking for Stanley Park. We were told several times to keep following the seawall. It turned out to be a pretty long walk, but it was worth it.
We took the horse-drawn trolley tour of the beautiful park. We recommend it, especially if you've expended all of your walking energy getting there and still have to get back to the hotel. One of the two horses had been in a movie once. He seemed to feel superior to the other. Periodically we could notice that his traces were slack - he was letting the other horse pull the whole load. Our driver had to flick her whip to encourage him to pull his weight.
We saw eagles and totem poles, many dozens of Canada Geese and billions of flowers. The park is nearly surrounded by water, and Lions Gate Bridge takes you from the north end of the park over to North Vancouver. The trolley didn't go there.
We stopped in a waterfront restaurant on the way back. The food was okay, but at least the price was outrageous. Finally we got back to the hotel and tried to sleep. We didn't have much luck, especially when Sandra and Olen arrived for a visit after their delayed flight from Houston finally got them to Vancouver. We made some plans for the morning - Carmen wanted to go to the Capillano Suspension Footbridge in North Vancouver, and we wanted them to see Stanley Park. We were scheduled to arrive at the cruise dock at 11:00 in the morning, so we had time for all of this if we got an early start.
After checking out, leaving our luggage at the front desk (we had quite an impressive heap of it now!) and an early breakfast at the hotel, Olen arranged for a limousine to take us to the footbridge, wait for us and take us back to the hotel and over to the cruise ship with our luggage. "He's going to need a bigger limo," I said to Olen.
The limo ride through Stanley Park wasn't nearly as nice as the trolley tour - we mostly stayed on the main road - but we did stop at a couple of picturesque spots and took picturesque pictures. The Lions Gate Bridge was high and a little scary for us bridge-o-phobes, but the Capillano Suspension Footbridge was very cool, very high, and hardly scary at all to me. Others in our party were more nervous about it, but we all crossed over and back. Then our driver took us up to the highest point in North Vancouver with a spectacular view of the bay and the city. We could see our cruise ship parked in its berth across the bay. We guessed it was time to go.
The trunk wouldn't close. Our driver figured, and we agreed that for the short distance we were going, the steaming heap of luggage would be all right. It was.
Our first experience with the Holland America process turned out to be pretty typical: it was a long wait in a big concrete room with no entertainment other than the people coming around to try to sell extra amenities such as bottles of wine. They offered onboard massages, which Sandra and Carmen signed up for. Party by party we were called up to a table where our reservations were verified and we received our cruise package including ID cards, ship maps, event schedules and tour itineraries. After several hours we were sent on through Customs. The ship was part of the United States, since our next opportunity to exit (on dry land) would be Juneau. We had trouble with our film. The Customs and security people dusted every roll to make sure they weren't explosives. Did I mention that this was a month and a half BEFORE security was stepped way up?
Everyone was starving by the time we got on the ship at around 2:00. One restaurant was open and almost two thousand of us were trying to get some lunch. Luckily, more food sources opened before anybody died of starvation. After that, there was food available pretty much everywhere on the ship at pretty much any time of day or night.
We went to our rooms - on different decks - to stow our stuff before heading out to the Lido Deck for the Casting Off Party at 4:00. It started about 4:30. The fun directors were introduced, and some loud music began. We actually got underway some time after 5:00, to great fanfare. We all went to our cabins only to be called out again for lifeboat and life vest drill. After that was over it was time to eat again.
We had reservations in the fancy dining room. Sandra and Olen changed their assigned table to join us at our assigned table. Also at our table was a couple from Lethbridge, Alberta. Lethbridge had been home to a double A minor league Dodgers team during the years I did a lot of work for the Dodgers in the early eighties. They had been big fans, and he'd worked for the Dodgers in Lethbridge, so we had a lot to talk aboot. That's how they said "about." Aboot.
Early in the evening it was time for the ship's naturalist to tell us, in words and pictures, what sorts of wildlives we could expect to see on the way and in Alaska. He had no pictures of himself in a Superman costume, but only because he hadn't thought of it. His most memorable line: "Some black bears are brown, some brown bears are black. The way you can tell which is which - if a bear is chasing you and you climb a tree, a black bear will climb up after you. A brown bear will just push the tree over."
Later on there was a song and dance extravaganza on the main stage. It was moderately entertaining. After a late night snack, we all went to bed.
Friday was a long day with nearly zero scenery other than a thin strip of brown and green at the eastern edge of the ocean. I got up at 5:30 and went out in search of my first breakfast. Afterward I returned to our cabin and waited for the other three to get ready for their first, my second breakfast. We were eating by some big windows, and I could occasionally spot a fin breaking the surface for an instant while the others weren't looking. I would report this, everyone would look, and see nothing. "There it is!" I'd say. They'd look. "There it is again." None of them ever saw these Dall's Porpoise but me.
I checked the movies- they were playing "Chocolat" and..."Shrek." I went to see Chocolat again while Carmen laid out on the deck. She got a sunburn out there. Came from Florida and got a sunburn in the coastal waters of British Columbia. After the movie was over, and before Shrek could start, I went to the same auditorium where the naturalist had been and found Carmen there to watch the Tlingit story teller. She was very entertaining. Then Carmen found Sandra and they went for their massages. I went up to the upper pool deck for some lunch.
Friday evening was the fancy dress dinner, or "the penguin party" as we called it. That was one thing we were definitely not going to. The four of us ordered room service and we ate down in Sandra and Olen's room. Afterward there was another song and dance thing. I went to see it, a smear of blue jeans among the sea of penguins. The coolest part was that during the show we passed out of Canadian waters and into Alaskan. The ship made some sharp turns and a barely perceptible stop to let off the Canadian pilots and bring on the US pilots. To us in the seats it was about twenty minutes of slightly strange bumps and rolls. To the dancers on stage, it was an invisible obstacle course. It's hard to dance when you're not sure where the floor will be under your next step.
Saturday morning I had my early breakfast as usual, and waited around in our cabin for the move to second breakfast. There were two big events today. First, at 11:00 the ship was passing through prime feeding grounds for humpback whales - there was a whale-watching extravaganza hosted by Mr. Natural outside on the deck. Then, in late afternoon, we were stopping in Juneau. I was ready ready ready to get the hell off of that floating prison.
The Whale Watch was very cool - and very windy going sixty knots. We saw at least thirty humpbacks. I swear I saw one killer whale off in the distance, but only once and not well. We learned when we got home that what looks like a whale tail in person can easily look like an indistinct black dot on your photographs. We did get a few good shots. Then we went inside to warm up, eat lunch and get ready for the Juneau adventure.
After two days of wide vistas of water with distant borders of land, suddenly we were cruising up a narrow waterway with colorful houses and small boats everywhere. We were told via ship's intercom to be ready to go ashore when the word was given to do so. We hung out in one of the plush lounges with big windows, watching Alaska go by. Juneau came along - a thin strip of mostly horizontal land with a vertical wall of mountain sealing it off from the rest of Alaska. There are precarious-looking steep and tall stairways cut into the mountain leading up to houses cut into the mountain.
We pulled into the dock and stopped. The word was given that we should proceed to the place where we had entered the ship on Thursday. We followed crowds toward elevators, and soon decided that the stairwells were a better deal. We almost made it to the exit when ship's employees began heading us off, telling us that the exit we were really using was two decks below. We headed back to the stairs and dashed down about halfway to the next deck before we slammed into the throng that was bottlenecked on the stairs. Carmen expressed discomfort with the crowded conditions, and we were prepared to climb back up to the deck above, but another throng was bearing down on us from above. For about a half hour we were wedged into a hot, stuffy, noisy stairwell, waiting for anything to move. Finally, slowly, the crowd loosened and began to trickle down to the proper deck and out the door to the gangway. Wow, fresh cool air. Soon after, solid ground.
We found our tour bus, which was scheduled to leave an hour or so before but wisely waited for the ship to spill its load. We rode through the brown landscape to Mendenhall Glacier where we hung out and took pictures for an hour or so, then continued on to the Wildlife Cruise dock. We boarded a boat with an enclosed central seating space, where the onboard naturalist (evidently naturalists are everywhere in and around Alaska during the summer) told us about what we were looking for. Outside there was a walkway all the way around for wildlife watching, and up the stairs was an upper deck with 360 degrees of visibility. We saw most of the items on the wildlife agenda.
There was a mother humpback with a calf. The boat crept close. Mama was not intimidated. She came up beside the boat and rolled over to give us a long look. She rolled back to vertical and exhaled. We were engulfed in an oily cloud of fishy bad breath. That'll teach us.
On the way back to the dock the naturalist talked to us some more, and offered us samples of smoked salmon. This was when Olen uttered a quote that lives on: "I don't care for salmon," he said, "it tastes like fish."
The road back to downtown Juneau took us by a lagoon at low tide. About thirty bald eagles were standing around in the mud.
We did a little shopping before retreating back to the ship. Believe it or not, we found a place on the ship to get something to eat before the Westerdam backed out of its berth and headed for Skagway.
Sunday morning's first breakfast is one I'll never ever forget. I was sitting by a window watching the shoreline go by, and then we stopped opposite Skagway. Over by the bank was a young humpback whale playing. It would stretch its long fin straight up in the air, then WHAM! slap the water with it. It would poke its tail straight up in the air, then WHAM! slap the water with it. I grabbed my muffin and coffee and ran four decks down to our cabin. I woke Carmen, and together we watched this show for a half hour or so.
Those of us who were leaving the ship in Skagway had a package slid under our door overnight. It had tags for our luggage and instructions about where to put it. We were instructed to gather in a certain auditorium for further information before we exited the ship. We showered, dressed and packed our five bags, leaving four of them in the hallway for the luggage fairies.
In the auditorium we were divided up into our various tour packages. Everyone in our group of twenty or so tourists was going to Whitehorse, Anchorage and Denali, and we were under the watchful eye of our tour guide, whose name I don't recall. When we finally got the go-ahead to exit the ship, first on the agenda, of course, was shopping in Skagway. Being Alaska, I wore a jacket. Unfortunately, the sun came out and it got too warm for a jacket. We could tell this was unusual. Shop owners and employees were going outside and looking up with puzzled expressions on their faces.
The next waiting program was at the railroad station. There were several groups going on the train. After a half hour or so of waiting, our group took up residence in one car at the very end of the train. I guess our luggage was in a baggage car. The next time we saw it was in Whitehorse.
If you remember my previous posting entitled "Tyrone," you'll know why I could call the next three days "Harry!" Harry was a gregarious and boistrous young adult who was mildly mentally challenged. His mother never let us forget his name.
The White Pass And Yukon Railway crosses the high rugged mountains that divide Skagway from the Yukon Territory and the gold in them thar hills. It was our introduction to another ongoing theme for this trip, Spectacular Mountain Views everywhere you look. The weirdest thing about the train ride, however, was that, while we were crossing mile-deep crevasses and executing hairpin turns aroung the edges of steep cliffs, Carmen was on the little platform outside at the rear of the car, hanging onto the railings taking spectacular mountain pictures.
At the other end of this wild ride there was a big luxury bus waiting for us. There was a Customs official there to check identification, but he didn't go through our (six now) bags. Soon, off we went across Yukon Territory, a land filled with green foliage, and blue green glacial streams and lakes. Oh yes, and spectacular mountain views. We stopped in a couple of little towns along the way for shopping and snacks, and it was supper time when we got to Whitehorse. Our tour guide gave us our orders for tomorrow's plane trip to anchorage including when and where to put our luggage for the fairies. Supper in the hotel restaurant was included in the package, so we HAD to eat there. The tour guide highly recommended the show, "Frantic Follies," and even though we were all ready to fall over and sleep, we went to the show. As advertised, it was great!
The next morning was another waiting game - waiting for the bus to the airport took an hour, during which time I went across the street to the home improvememt store. I wasn't going to buy anything, but then I saw this cool head lamp for ten bucks Canadian. "Hmm," I said, "I may never find one of these again." I turned the package over. It came from a distribution company in... wait for it... Orlando, Florida. I didn't buy it.
Finally we were allowed to board the bus to the Whitehorse airport, where we waited for another two hours or so to board the plane. It was on this flight over Yukon Territory and Alaska to Anchorage that I finally understood the description of glaciers as "rivers of ice." Out the windows we could see long blue lines that looked like rivers winding among the spectacular mountains. Glaciers. Ice packed so deep that the weight of the ice causes the bottom layers to heat up from the pressure, the whole heap slip-sliding downhill at an imperceptible rate of speed and calving off ice bergs at the end. Now I get it!
We landed at Anchorage airport and went through Customs AGAIN with our six bags, no problem. We boarded another bus (with no air conditioning) which took us to the Alaska Native Heritage Center for a couple of hours, which was very cool and we wished we could stay longer, then on a long, hot, stuffy tour of downtown Anchorage. All we wanted was to get off the bus and get something to eat. We passed our hotel three or four times. "Can't we just get out?" we asked three or four times. One good thing was that we passed (twice) a big sign outside a restaurant with outdoor dining that offered "Alaska King Crab Leg Dinners $10.99" Olen had to have him some of that. So after we stopped at Ship Creek to watch dying salmon die for twenty minutes, we finally made it to the hotel, checked into our rooms and made a bee line for the crab legs. The waitress came over. "What can I get you?" Olen piped up: "Two orders of king crab legs. What would you like, Sandra?"
After supper there was more shopping. I bought a cap that said "Anchorage" on it to replace my Annapolis cap that I bought in...Annapolis... in 2000, which I lost on the ship. Remember this Anchorage hat. It surfaces again in 2005 in a story we're going to call "Mass. Hysteria."
I don't remember clearly, but I believe we went to bed early in preparation for our trip to Denali in the morning. Early or late, it's still daylight in the summer. But first we did what our marching orders told us to do with our luggage - leave it in the hallway for the fairies. This time it was being stored at the hotel until we came back from Denali the next night. We were to take everything we might need for an overnight trip - two bags.
I do remember that I got up at 5:00 and went in search of my first breakfast. I circled the block and three more blocks and never even found any coffee. My first and only breakfast was at the same time as everybody else's, at the restaurant in the hotel.
There was, believe it or not, a long wait to go to Denali. We were crammed into a little vestibule of the hotel for almost an hour. Then we filed onto a nice big bus and spread out for the ride. Our tour guide was supplemented by another Holland America tour guide who worked the Denali run. They had games for us to play, told silly stories, led us in songs, and communicated with the other tour bus by radio. Harry was in fine form, and I became known as "loud raucus laughter guy." It was a long ride. We stopped in a couple of little towns - Willow and Talkeetna - and the whole trip took nearly eight hours. We were scheduled for a four-hour wildlife bus tour of the National Park after we arrived. We nearly skipped it, but after checking into our cabins and resting a bit, we all four decided to go.
We saw many caribou, one moose, lots of Dall sheep, a grizzly bear, and the state bird, the willow ptarmigan. Oh, yes - and plenty of Spectacular Mountain Views! Not Denali itself, though. Mount McKinley was shrouded in clouds the whole time we were there. Harry stood up by the driver during most of the tour, his mother shrieking his name periodically. The driver even opened the door for Harry to take pictures without dirty glass in the way. All in all we were glad we went.
It was nearly nine when we got back to our cabins. We were hungry, and our tour guide recommended the pizza place within easy walking distance. Practically the whole busload of us went. The pizza was good.
The next morning we had until 9:00 to board the bus to the train station to catch the train back to Anchorage. Sandra and Olen did the helicopter ride landing on a glacier. They said it was fun, but it was a cold ride. We did some shopping and had a liesurely breakfast (my second - I found a gas station convenience store open at 5:00.) While we ate we watched another couple from our tour party having their picture taken in Gold Rush duds, sitting in a dogsled in front of a log cabin set.
We got on the bus right on time, no waiting. The waiting came in at the railroad station. It was cold and windy. Luckily there was cold weather gear for sale in the station gift shop.
The train ride back to Anchorage was kind of melancholy. The twenty or so of us that had been touring together for four days were splitting up after this ride. Harry had a route going, through the upper deck of our car, down the steps to the lower deck, which was the dining area, through that to the other set of stairs and back up for another round, stopping to talk to anyone who would talk to him. Lunch was done in shifts, taking up a large part of the four-hour trip. The views were spectacular, of course, and I even saw a black bear out the window - although nobody else did.
We didn't get any orders for luggage or anything else this evening. When we got back to the hotel and checked in, the tour was done. Everybody was going home to somewhere except for Carmen and me. We had an early morning train to Seward. We said our good byes to Sandra and Olen and went to bed.
I felt kind of crappy when I awoke Thursday morning. As we cabbed to the railroad station and waited for the train, I felt exponentially worse. I was able to enjoy the ride, with its plethora of spectacular mountain views - some with waterfalls! - bald eagles everywhere, and a moose. By the time we got to Seward, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and die. So we checked in at our B&B, stowed our luggage - seven bags now- and went out to explore. We found the dock where our wildlife cruise would depart in the morning. We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant, then continued down the main street to the Alaska Sealife Center.
The Alaska Sealife Center is a research, rescue and educational facility funded by Exxon as part of their settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill debacle. It was very interesting, but the coolest thing for us was this huge octopus sulking in the corner of a big tank. We stood in front looking into those soulful octopus eyes and feeling sorry that it was reduced to cowering in a tank with boneheads like us gawking at it. Suddenly it propelled itself out of its lair and came straight at us. It spread its tentacles to their full extension - about five feet in diameter - on the glass in front of our faces. It stayed there for a few minutes in all its glory, then returned to its corner. Years later, Carmen saw a story in the news about an old octopus at the ASLC that had been introduced to a female. They produced some baby octopi before the old man died. We felt like he was an old friend.
We explored a couple of shops and museums on the way back up the street before we returned to the Bed & Breakfast. I curled up to finish dying, and Carmen went to find us something to eat. I don't remember anything after that.
The next morning Carmen went and had breakfast with the owners and the other couple in residence - visiting from Wales. I got showered and changed into my wildlife cruise duds. We mosied down to the dock, checked in at the office, and went for a cruise. This one was very different from Saturday's at Juneau. The first life we saw was one lone sea otter - one of the items on my personal agenda - floating on its back as we cruised by. Puffins were everywhere. Ice floes were everywhere, each with a seal perched on it. We went to the Northwestern Glacier, discovered by a team from Northwestern University many years ago, and watched it calve. As each chunk broke off and fell into the sea, a seal would pop up on it. The naturalist told us that there were things in the water that ate seals. We never saw them.
I felt progressively better as we cruised through the day. It was a nine-hour 150 mile round trip and very enjoyable. Then we had dinner at a waterfront restaurant and headed back to the B&B.
Saturday we packed up and left our bags in an out-of-the-way place at the B&B office while we returned to the Seward exploration project. She bought some stuff and had the shops ship it to Orlando. Generally, we were killing time until the afternoon, when the train would be ready to return us to Anchorage. And even though we were no longer connected to Holland America, we waited a long time at the train station.
The only thing I recall about the trip back to Anchorage was that I snagged my thumbnail on a piece of train hardware and broke a little chunk out of my nail. Now I was snagging on everything, and the nail clippers were somewhere in the checked luggage. It was dark when we arrived. We cabbed to our new hotel, near the airport, and went right to bed. We had an early flight out in the morning, and we were happy to be nearby.
First thing Sunday morning we cabbed to the airport and checked five of our seven bags. We kept our regular carry-on, and Carmen held onto her bag with the pottery in it. For the rest of the day, people were giving me the stinkeye because Carmen was carrying the big heavy bag of pottery. I would have been glad to carry it, but she wouldn't let go of it.
I'll make a very long story short and say that our flight was delayed twelve hours. One man standing in the line of disgruntled passengers waiting to talk to airline reps about changing connecting flight schedules keeled over after three hours. When we got up there, paralegal Carmen came away with several meal vouchers and an upgrade to First Class on our connecting flight out of Minneapolis. Once we had that behind us, we grabbed a cab back to the Alaska Native Heritage Center for a liesurely and enjoyable visit. The only bad part was that everybody there gave me the stinkeye because Carmen was carrying the big heavy bag of pottery.
When we returned to the airport, we used a meal voucher, lounged around for a bit, then went ahead through security. We staked out our spot to wait the remaining hour and a half. I went into the little gift shop by the gates and found what I was looking for: nail clippers! This was a little set with a bottle opener and a knife included in a pouch that said "Alaska" on one side and "Made In China" on the other. Good thing it wasn't a month and a half later.
The two flights home are a blur in my memory. I slept a lot A. because I was exhausted, and B. because the movie on both flights was...Shrek.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Bearing A Pall For A Pal
Early Sunday morning, November 23rd, 1997, I got a phone call from the Buinickas household. Michael John Buinickas, my best friend since 1966 and Boy Scout buddy since '65, had keeled over dead the night before at age 46. No warning, just getting ready for bed as usual, keeled over dead. Later in the day we had funeral information, round trip airline tickets to Baltimore Washington International Airport for Tuesday afternoon, a hotel room for two nights, and a rental car reserved.
Using my newly acquired technology, the internet, I printed out a map from the airport to the funeral home. I also printed a map to the hotel, which was near the airport. I was hugely impressed with myself. And that newfangled internet thang.
Monday was a blur. I was in shock. This was the first (and so far the last) time that someone I really cared about had died. I must have made arrangements to be off work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were Thanksgiving Holiday days at F/X Scenery And Display. I was Mister Dependability at FX, so I got the time off, no problem. They'd all heard about Michael B. for years anyway.
We flew to Maryland, arriving mid-to-late afternoon. By the time we had our rental car it was time to just go straight to the funeral home, about ten miles away in Bowie. It was getting dark as we arrived, and there was a pretty big crowd for the viewing. The family was happy to see us. Mister B. said "Ah, there's my other son!" Even Michael's Aunt Helen corralled us for a long time. Afterward we were invited to Michael and Kathy's house in Odenton for something to eat, and we were hungry. During our time there Kathy buttonholed me in the kitchen and asked me to be a pall bearer. I said I'd be honored. Always a pall bearer, never a pall. Then we made our way in the late evening all the way to Linthicum to the hotel. It was hard to find in the dark, but we got there. I didn't sleep much.
Wednesday morning we headed out to the church, and I hung out in the pall bearer marshalling area. While I waited, a troop of Boy Scouts filed by. I almost lost it. Michael's dad had been our Scoutmaster, we served three years together, the last one as cooks for the troop. Then years later Michael had taken over the Scoutmaster position. Many of our favorite stories were Boy Scout stories. My mind drifted away with the wind of time. I tried mightily to hear and remember the instructions we pall bearers were given, but it entered my brain as if Charlie Brown's teacher were saying it. I went where they pointed, carried my share of the load, then just sort of stood there at the front of the sanctuary until one of my co-bearers indicated where I should sit.
The only thing I remember about the service itself was brother Bill Buinickas telling us about Michael, and how it had long been Michael that cemented the family together. I look back on that now in light of the fact that Kathy and their kids have fallen out from the rest of the family in recent years. I've had to reconnect with Mike's sister to hear any news from that side.
After the service we hoisted him up and carried him to the Hearse. Then we were released from duty. Carmen and I saddled up the rental car and got in line behind old old Uncle Nick and Aunt Helen, who doddered their way back through Odenton to the Episcopal church where the Boy Scouts had been meeting for many long years, where I spent Sundays and more during the first fourteen years of my life, and where my mother's best friend is buried.
After the graveside ceremony, there was a luncheon at the Elks Hall in Crofton. We got separated from the herd somehow, drove to Crofton and had to ask directions to the Elks lodge. When we got there, there were many tables nearly full of family and friends. We hardly knew any of them except the immediate family, so we found an empty corner by ourselves and prepared to have some lunch. We had no more than sat down with our plates, however, when a member of the immediate family appeared behind us. They had seen us crouching in our corner, had pity on us, and invited us to sit with them. It seemed fitting to me. I had lived with them several summers and many weekends, mowed their lawn, washed their cars, washed their dishes and shared their meals since the sixties. I had been a best man, an usher and a driver at three of their weddings. Mr. and Mrs. B asked us when our flight back to Orlando was. It was Thursday afternoon at five or so. They invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, also in Odenton. I told Carmen she was in for a treat. I'd done Thanksgiving with them several times.
After the luncheon we went to Glen Burnie, where I had lived and worked from 1971-76. We saw a movie (Starship Troopers) did a little shopping, checked out the Montgomery Ward store where I'd built displays for four years, and had supper at a seafood restaurant that hadn't been there back then.
We slept in awhile at the hotel, showered dressed, packed up and checked out. Thanksgiving at Buinickas Central was everything I knew it would be: turkey, ham, golumkes, perushkis, kielbasa, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, cakes, pies, ice cream, coffee, yummy yummy! But the most memorable moment came when their cat, banished from the long extended table of twenty five participants, hurled a stream of vomit directly at the center of everything. Priceless.
About three thirty we said our good byes to all the clan. It was the last time I've seen most of them. I miss Bill most of all. We were brothers for many years, until he moved to Illinois, got married and had a family of his own. I reconnected with sister Margaret on Classmates.com a year or two ago, and get my news through her. Kathy stays in touch pretty well. After all, we were best friends once removed since 1969. She came to Orlando to visit us back in 1998 or so. Carmen and I visited her in the fall of 2000, soon after Michael's first grandbaby was born. We stopped by to see Mr. and Mrs. B. at Buinickas Central for an hour or so. That's the last I've seen of them. Sometimes I get a hankering to just show up on their doorstep as in days of old, and see if my place is still set at their table.
Using my newly acquired technology, the internet, I printed out a map from the airport to the funeral home. I also printed a map to the hotel, which was near the airport. I was hugely impressed with myself. And that newfangled internet thang.
Monday was a blur. I was in shock. This was the first (and so far the last) time that someone I really cared about had died. I must have made arrangements to be off work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were Thanksgiving Holiday days at F/X Scenery And Display. I was Mister Dependability at FX, so I got the time off, no problem. They'd all heard about Michael B. for years anyway.
We flew to Maryland, arriving mid-to-late afternoon. By the time we had our rental car it was time to just go straight to the funeral home, about ten miles away in Bowie. It was getting dark as we arrived, and there was a pretty big crowd for the viewing. The family was happy to see us. Mister B. said "Ah, there's my other son!" Even Michael's Aunt Helen corralled us for a long time. Afterward we were invited to Michael and Kathy's house in Odenton for something to eat, and we were hungry. During our time there Kathy buttonholed me in the kitchen and asked me to be a pall bearer. I said I'd be honored. Always a pall bearer, never a pall. Then we made our way in the late evening all the way to Linthicum to the hotel. It was hard to find in the dark, but we got there. I didn't sleep much.
Wednesday morning we headed out to the church, and I hung out in the pall bearer marshalling area. While I waited, a troop of Boy Scouts filed by. I almost lost it. Michael's dad had been our Scoutmaster, we served three years together, the last one as cooks for the troop. Then years later Michael had taken over the Scoutmaster position. Many of our favorite stories were Boy Scout stories. My mind drifted away with the wind of time. I tried mightily to hear and remember the instructions we pall bearers were given, but it entered my brain as if Charlie Brown's teacher were saying it. I went where they pointed, carried my share of the load, then just sort of stood there at the front of the sanctuary until one of my co-bearers indicated where I should sit.
The only thing I remember about the service itself was brother Bill Buinickas telling us about Michael, and how it had long been Michael that cemented the family together. I look back on that now in light of the fact that Kathy and their kids have fallen out from the rest of the family in recent years. I've had to reconnect with Mike's sister to hear any news from that side.
After the service we hoisted him up and carried him to the Hearse. Then we were released from duty. Carmen and I saddled up the rental car and got in line behind old old Uncle Nick and Aunt Helen, who doddered their way back through Odenton to the Episcopal church where the Boy Scouts had been meeting for many long years, where I spent Sundays and more during the first fourteen years of my life, and where my mother's best friend is buried.
After the graveside ceremony, there was a luncheon at the Elks Hall in Crofton. We got separated from the herd somehow, drove to Crofton and had to ask directions to the Elks lodge. When we got there, there were many tables nearly full of family and friends. We hardly knew any of them except the immediate family, so we found an empty corner by ourselves and prepared to have some lunch. We had no more than sat down with our plates, however, when a member of the immediate family appeared behind us. They had seen us crouching in our corner, had pity on us, and invited us to sit with them. It seemed fitting to me. I had lived with them several summers and many weekends, mowed their lawn, washed their cars, washed their dishes and shared their meals since the sixties. I had been a best man, an usher and a driver at three of their weddings. Mr. and Mrs. B asked us when our flight back to Orlando was. It was Thursday afternoon at five or so. They invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, also in Odenton. I told Carmen she was in for a treat. I'd done Thanksgiving with them several times.
After the luncheon we went to Glen Burnie, where I had lived and worked from 1971-76. We saw a movie (Starship Troopers) did a little shopping, checked out the Montgomery Ward store where I'd built displays for four years, and had supper at a seafood restaurant that hadn't been there back then.
We slept in awhile at the hotel, showered dressed, packed up and checked out. Thanksgiving at Buinickas Central was everything I knew it would be: turkey, ham, golumkes, perushkis, kielbasa, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, cakes, pies, ice cream, coffee, yummy yummy! But the most memorable moment came when their cat, banished from the long extended table of twenty five participants, hurled a stream of vomit directly at the center of everything. Priceless.
About three thirty we said our good byes to all the clan. It was the last time I've seen most of them. I miss Bill most of all. We were brothers for many years, until he moved to Illinois, got married and had a family of his own. I reconnected with sister Margaret on Classmates.com a year or two ago, and get my news through her. Kathy stays in touch pretty well. After all, we were best friends once removed since 1969. She came to Orlando to visit us back in 1998 or so. Carmen and I visited her in the fall of 2000, soon after Michael's first grandbaby was born. We stopped by to see Mr. and Mrs. B. at Buinickas Central for an hour or so. That's the last I've seen of them. Sometimes I get a hankering to just show up on their doorstep as in days of old, and see if my place is still set at their table.
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